Alexandra was reading Henriettas manuscript.

"This," she said, pointing with her finger, "is inane."

Henrietta got up and looked over Alexandras shoulder at the sentence.

"Yes," she said. "I prefer the inane, sometimes. The ane is often inutile to the artist."

There was a moment of contemplation.

"I have been offered a thousand florins for it," Henrietta said. "The Dutch rights."

"How much is that in our money?"

"Two hundred sixty-six dollars."

"Bless Babel," Alexandra said, and took her friend in her arms.

Henrietta said: "Once I was a young girl, very much like any other young girl, interested in the same things, I was exemplary. I was told what I was, that is to say a young girl, and I knew what I was because I had been told and because there were other young girls all around me who had been told the same things and knew the same things, and looking at them and hearing again in my head the things I had been told I knew what a young girl was. We had all been told the same things. I had not been told, for example, that some wine was piss and some not and I had not been told. . . other things. Still I had been told a great many things all very useful but I had not been told that I was going to die in any way that would allow me to realize that I really was going to die and that it would be all over, then, and that this was all there was and that I had damned well better make the most of it. That I discovered for myself and covered with shame and shit as I was I made the most of it. I had not been told how to make the most of it but I figured it out. Then I moved through a period of depression, the depression engendered by the realization that I had placed myself beyond the pale, there I was, beyond the pale. Then I discovered that there were other people beyond the pale with me, that there were quite as many people on the wrong side of the pale as there were on the right side of the pale and that the people on the wrong side of the pale were as complex as the people on the right side of the pale, as unhappy, as subject to time, as subject to death. So what the fuck? I said to myself in the colorful language I had learned on the wrong side of the pale. By this time I was no longer a young girl. I was mature."

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