Diana steadfastly refused to wear any label, and it horrified her now to hear of young women who called themselves not only lesbians but dykes, as if they took on the world’s judgment of them and flaunted it. And now here was her brother, taking up the label and thinking he could sanitize it.

‘You see?’ says the moral dry-cleaner. ‘Spotless! Now won’t you put it on and see how becoming it is after all?’

It was a uniform worn by a bunch of mercenaries pretending that their appetite to shock and horrify was instead a holy crusade. Or by the guilty, who smudged it on their foreheads as a penitence. Either stance went on contributing to the crucial and fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of sexuality which couldn’t be isolated, labelled, and then judged by any system of real values. It was like trying to decide whether the power of speech was a gift from God or the devil.

But no matter which direction her argument took in her head, she came up against David’s puzzlement at her fury, as if it weren’t a topic about which she needed such righteous indignation to make herself clear. Why did something about which she was so sure come out sounding arrogant, snobbish and, yes, even fearful?

‘This is drivel,’ Constance said. ‘It doesn’t say “bed” here, but everything else is crossed off.’

‘Jill’s coming tomorrow with some new clothes for you to try on, for the desert. We’re going next week,’ Diana said, after she had gratefully turned off the set ‘and then she’s going to spend the afternoon here while I go hunt up some things for myself.’

‘Do I need new clothes?’

‘We both do. We should really send everything we own to the Sally Ann and start all over again.’

Jill had to make two trips from her small car.

‘Sometimes a back seat would be handy,’ she admitted. ‘Marty put this sun hat on top of the pile so it would look like an overstuffed passenger.’

Diana didn’t have the figure for Marty’s clothes on Tenth Avenue, but in the old days Constance had often shopped there. Jill, with Marty’s help, had chosen wonderfully well. The confusion of bright colours on the bed delighted Constance.

‘I don’t know where to begin!’ she exclaimed.

‘Try these white slacks,’ Jill suggested. ‘Then you can keep them on for various tops.’

Diana and Jill sat on the two bedroom chairs in a conspiracy of pleasure. Constance stepped into the trim white slacks, then rummaged among the tops with increasing uncertainty.

‘They all look too big,’ she confessed.

‘The latest style,’ Jill reassured her, getting up to assist. ‘Look, try this one.’

It was brilliant watermelon pink, cut like a man’s shirt with tails. Constance disappeared into it, her head emerging out of volumes of material.

‘Push up the sleeves,’ Jill suggested, laughing.