This, Vida thought forebodingly, is what it means to grow up. Our girlhood is gone. Is it because men have made love to us? But we're both still looking for love, and for a meaning to life. What has happened to make Lucy so uncertain? What strange mixed-up thoughts, feelings, and fears are churning in that beautiful head from which used to issue those succinct observations I accepted as gospel? A Lucy, always confident and direct as a bird, now become fearful and wavering. Even as she tries to explain I can not understand, yet something has changed. It can't have happened suddenly. Where would the change begin if I were to try to tell her story? When we talk today it's as though we were walking towards each other but bypass. She is telling me and I don't hear.
"Then when I did sleep," Lucy told on, "I had a terrible nightmare. I was in a room in an awful hotel in Denver. The Crofter. Everyone was trying to push me into the connecting room where there were two girls, prostitutes, and Horta Cornwallis was there and her teeth kept rolling in and out of her gums. She was trying to grab me. Then the room looked like another room in that apartment Lyle took me to, where his two friends kept their girls."
"It was probably something you ate," Vida said.
"Maybe," Lucy said dully. "Do you think I ought to be psychoanalyzed? Anyway, I was so frightened I was perspiring all over and shivering when I woke and I phoned you but there was no answer. Where were you at three in the morning?"
"Asleep. The phone is in the hall, you know," Vida said uncomfortably, remembering awakening and not answering as it might be Rad.
"There is one other thing I must tell you, but you must promise not to repeat it to anyone, especially Figente."
"For heaven's sake, what now!"
"I don't think anyone in New York but me knows that Horta Cornwallis was a Madam in Denver. In a big old mansion near our roominghouse. I think she knows I know but I can't make out how."
"What of it? From what I've heard Figente say about her she still is one in one sense of the word. She caters to people's other vices."
"I know. Figente admires her for it. But she frightens me. Even after the ball she phoned again and said what a hit Ranna was and that she hoped I wouldn't disappoint her next time. It sounded like a threat. I feel better now that I've told you. You are so sensible, you never get into scrapes."
