‘I love you,’ Diana answered, a statement that had never become routine, for, even after all these years, she did not take the returning love for granted.

It was not only that Constance was a woman but her being such a desirable woman that had made her choice of Diana so unlikely. It was Constance who had chosen. Diana wouldn’t have had the audacity without clear encouragement, but she had had the courage to love Constance and go on loving Constance in a growing sureness of heart, which had never been suitor.

Diana’s early loves, aside from her brother, had been secret. The little girl with dark curls who lived in the next block was popular with all the children. She led about a gang of little girls always trying to be her best friend, and the boys were always tormenting her. Diana made no effort to join the gang or the torturers, but she watched for that head of dark curls on the school playground and in the halls. Very occasionally they met, but Diana never answered that ready smile because she didn’t want to make friends, nothing as silly as that. She wanted to make a pact for shared, high, solemn heroics in a wonderful myth that left childhood far behind, never mind that the myth was made up of the stuff of her brother’s junky comic books.

In high school Diana was in love with her chemistry teacher, a young woman of indifferent looks and sharp intelligence who was obviously proud of her distinction as the only female chemistry teacher in the school system. Far from wanting to be a role model for girls of similar ambition, she was determined to keep that place for herself. She encouraged the boys, mocked the inept girls and only tolerated the few like Diana, bright and dedicated not only to the subject but to her. Diana never volunteered to answer a question. She was called on only when she might not know the answer. She always did. She never stayed after class to ask questions. But she did not join the mockery and complaints the taskmasters always inspired in their students.

‘I was quite surprised, Diana,’ the teacher said at the end of the year, ‘to find you at the top of the class.’

It was not this admission Diana’s fantasies had wrested from her teacher, but it would have to do.