“Why, Christine’s hair is lovely. Just lovely.” She spoke deliberately. “Don’t you let anybody cut it, Christine. It’s the kind of hair you don’t see now, it’s the kind of lovely long hair a man would like to choke himself with winding it around his neck—if he had the chance.”

Dina stood up. She pulled herself up very high from the waist, out of what she sometimes referred to as the rib cage. She adjusted her waistline and stretched her neck from side to side as though bored and finished with it all.

“Let me know if I can help. Most of the good shops and the department heads and so on know me. I get a professional discount, you know. From when I was in pictures and”—humbly —“one of those little models with the patent-leather hatbox.” She turned away with a small properly stifled yawn, then turned back to face the girl. “But if you’re going to buy some things that aren’t tacky you’ll have to take off some of that fat, first.”

“Fat! I wear size twelve!”

“I’m an eight.”

There came a discreet knock at the closed door. “It’s the coffee,” Louise Husack’s tone had the greedy anticipation of the caffeine addict. “Come in! I sure need it.”

Christine Storm covered her face with her two hands in what was to her an unprecedented feeling of inferiority.

“What’s going on here! The trial of Joan of Arc?” Bayard Husack leaned against the doorway. Dina walked toward him, she just placed her fingers against his cheek, gently, as a wife might greet a husband home from a day at the office. “What timing, Bay!”

Louise Husack was scandalized. “Bayard Husack, get right out of here!”

“Why?”

“Because Chris is trying on clothes, that’s why.”

Christine did not cringe or wrap herself in her arms, or otherwise display maidenly confusion at being viewed by male eyes while wearing a black nylon lace-trimmed slip that came well down below her knees and well up above her breasts. She was cross and upset. “Hi, Bay,” she said, spiritlessly.

Bay remained negligently leaning against the doorway. Dina now put a hand on his shoulder and, just as negligently, leaned against him.

A dull unbecoming flush so rare in the elderly now suffused Louise Husack’s ocherous cheeks. She gave a poor performance of shocked propriety. “Barging into my bedroom and staring at a young girl!”

“Ladies,” Bayard Husack said, “pardon my mom. She’s got a dirty mind. The truth is, Christine—or should I say Miss Storm—I’ll take that up later—anyway, the truth is that girls in slips and girls in those strapless evening jobs and even girls in bikinis and a couple of clam shells—in fact, especially girls in those sordid gadgets—simply don’t attract me. It’s a deviation in me, or perhaps a perversion. But just let me see a girl who’s wrapped up from head to foot like a laundry bundle! That brings out the beast in me.”

From the pile of garments on the bed Christine now dug out a bulky navy blue chain-knit sweater with a turtle-neck collar. This she pulled over her head thrust her arms into the thick sleeves, and jerked its folds well down over her hips.