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herself deaf to the intelligence of Stella's words while absorbing all the while the soft, laughter-threaded sound of Stella's voice. To be acutely aware in a kind of hard, hurting ecstasy of the proximate, pulsing reality of Stella in sheerest silk.
    The difficult nights were the ones when Stella did not come upstairs at once after returning from wherever she'd been. Kathy would hear her come into the hall downstairs with whatever man it might be, and pretty soon the front door would open again and close behind someone departing, but it would be the colored woman and not the man. Following roughly the pattern of events below by the broken threads of sound that reached her, Kathy could feel herself drawing tighter and tighter as tension increased. But worse than that, worse by far than the mounting effect of sound, were the intervals of silence. These, offering no clues and suggesting no pattern, leaving everything to the irrational antics of the mind, were hardly to be endured.
    Eventually, after nearly a year, there was one which could not be endured. Moving under a compulsion she could in no way deny, Kathy got out of bed and went out into the hall and downstairs into the hall below and across to the entrance to the living room. Though her bare feet made no appreciable noise on the treads of the stairs or the uncovered floor of the hall, she did not try to be secretive, and she stood squarely in the entrance to look into the room. One lamp was burning at the far end of the sofa. She could see nothing clearly at first except that small area which was within the perimeter of light cast by the lamp, but then the rest of the room and its contents took shape, and she saw Stella and the man in the outer area of shadow just beyond the sofa and the lamp.
    They were kissing. And that was the horror of it. That it was mutual. Not that Stella was being kissed, for which she could have been exonerated as a victim, but that Stella was kissing in return. That it was obviously something she wanted to happen, had helped to make happen. That it was something she liked . Her fingers were tangled in the man's hair, drawing his head down to a hot, adherent contact of mouths, and her body was overtly aggressive.
    Turning with a whimper, Kathy ran back upstairs to her bed. She lay on her back with her eyes closed, shaking with a chill that crept through her from a central core of ice, and she thought that she was certainly going to be sick to her stomach. She didn't open her eyes when Stella finally came up and undressed for bed, and she kept them closed when Stella spoke her name.
    It was all of a week before she opened her eyes and answered when Stella spoke.
     

Chapter 3
    This was not the first morning she had awakened in the sour aftermath of the night before to the wish that she might never have to get up, to the regret that she had not died in her sleep. But always before, her depression had been a corollary of her personality, an element in a way of life that, if it never improved, might at least survive. Therefore, there was hope, and after a while the depression lifted and regret was abandoned.
    Now there was no hope. She was damned, not for what she was, but for what she had done. She had killed. Murdered. In the tiny kitchen of a certain apartment, a man named Angus Brunn lay on the linoleum with an ice-pick penetrating his abdomen at an upward angle and perhaps puncturing his heart. He was dead, and she had killed him, and there was no way on earth to undo the act or its results, or to make anyone but herself responsible for it.
    Soon someone would discover the body, probably before the day was out. It was possible, even, that the body had already been discovered—by a cleaning woman, by a friend, by anyone who might have had a reason for entering the apartment. If so, the intricate social machinery designed for the hunting of transgressors was already in operation. Men to whom murder was a job were converging on the house which