For the remainder of June, July and August, she saw him three or four times a week. She would have liked to see him every day. That would happen only after Labor Day, when she would move in with him. Then she would truly become his slave, subject to his commands and his whims, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty five days a year—she saw no end to it and wanted none. For her part she was ready now but he wanted her to wait; it was not, after all, a step to be entered into lightly. So this became a trial period, as if she were a novitiate in a religious order. It was an image that appealed to her; if it was a religion it was a heretical one, like some underground pagan cult that had persisted over the centuries or millennia, its teachings handed down in secre
