CHAPTER FOUR
Tess prided herself on her ability to identify a lesbian. She would insist, for example, as she shopped in town with one or another of the whores from Charles Avenue, that this or that housewife would have been bette'- off marrying a woman rather than a man. On one occasion she became quite vociferous and unmannerly, and she grabbed a young teenage girl by the shirt collar and shouted in the frightened child's face: "Come by my house sometime, and Madam Tess will show you-what you really like, honey." The outburst had come from nowhere, it seemed, but Tess insisted that one day her prediction would be proved right, that the young girl would show her true colors as a woman lover.
So it was that one afternoon when Tess, as
usual, perching herself after tea at thi; living-room
