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toward them went through a slow metamorphosis from a general resentment to a childish, particularized hatred as she learned to identify them as individuals.
    With the door of her room open so she could hear, she would lie in bed and follow in detail the audible stages of each arrival and departure. Allowing for a little variation in the time element, they all followed a routine that acquired for Kathy in its constant repetition the quality of torture, like the ancient practice of letting water drip on someone's forehead—the car stopping at the curb in front of the house, footsteps on the approach from the street, the doorbell, Stella's voice in greeting and the masculine response. Sometimes, if Stella wasn't taken away at once, there would be other sounds—of ice and glass, of music, of the many small supports with which a man and a woman may shore a frail relationship.
    She fought sleep. She fought it with all her strength in the hope that she could be awake when Stella returned, and sometimes she was successful. There was a reason for this. She and Stella shared the same room, and this was because Kathy, in the time following the death of her mother, was subject to nightmares. She awoke screaming in the night, terrified by the pressing darkness. So Stella, a warm and responsive person with a genuine and growing love for her niece, had taken Kathy into her room. They had twin beds, and it was a wonderful arrangement, because Kathy, if she could only stay awake, could have with Stella the last delicious intimacy of the day.
    Lying very still, looking through the narrowest of slits that left vision a little blurred by her lashes, she watched Stella come into the room and turn on the soft light through which she moved while getting ready for bed.
    Stella's hair was usually a little disheveled and her lips sometimes a little smudged, and she moved about her business with a kind of floating dreaminess to the accompaniment of a trivial tune which she hummed to herself. As in everything she did, there was a charming disorder in Stella's undressing. Moving to the tune, in and out of the adjoining bathroom, she left her dress here and her slip there, one stocking one place and the other another, and so through a Utter of shimmer and froth until she stood at last by the bed in a transparent cloud of nightgown.
    She learned soon enough that Kathy watched her. The knowledge gave her a sincere, unanalyzed pleasure, and she fell into the habit of stopping beside Kathy's bed when she returned in darkness from turning off the light
    "Kathy?"
    "Yes, Stella?"
    "You're awake again, you little devil. Do you know what time it is? You'll grow up with bags under your eyes."
    "You stay awake late. You don't have bags."
    "That's entirely different. I'm older and don't need so much sleep. Besides, I can sleep in the morning. I don't have to get up and go to school."
    "I'm sorry, Stella. I just couldn't sleep."
    "Would you like me to tell you where I went and what I did tonight?"
    "Oh, yes."
    This was a lie. Or, rather, it was partly a lie. She didn't really want to hear about Stella's activity, because that involved one of the many men as a participant, and the men were already, so soon, the dark violators of the shining center of her life which was Stella. Hearing Stella's dreamy, unconsciously cruel accounts of them was an experience that filled her with a sickening resentment that frightened her because it was, though she didn't yet recognize it, evidence of her own violent potential. Still, on the other hand, she would rather suffer the anguish of Stella's accounts than to have her go on to her own bed and lie down in silence, so it was also partly true that she wanted to listen.
    "Very well, then," Stella would say. "For just a few minutes. Move over, please."
    And this was the climax that Kathy waited for. To move over in the narrow bed. To breathe and feel the warmth and scent of Stella as she slipped into the bed to lie beside her. To make