They gave him their orders and Laura tried to catch his eye, hoping for more information about the place. She was curious now. There were checkered table cloths, fish nets on the wall, a lot of people—all rather young—at the tables and bar. The juke box was going and somebody was trying to pick up a few bucks doing pencil portraits, but no one seemed very interested. The customers looked like students. There were girls in cotton pants, young men in sweaters and open-collared shirts. “They all look like students,” she said to Burr. He grinned. “I never thought of it that way,” he said. “I guess they do, all right.” She stared at him. And then she looked around the room again, and suddenly she saw a girl with her arm around another girl at a table not far away. Her heart jumped. A pair of boys at the bar were whispering urgently to each other. _Gay_, Laura thought to herself. _Is that what they call it? Gay?_ She was acutely uncomfortable now. It was as if she were a child of civilization, reared among the savages, who suddenly found herself among the civilized. She recognized them as her own. And yet she had adopted the habits of another race and she was embarrassed and lost with her own kind. They looked at her—her own kind—from the bar and from the tables, and didn’t recognize her. And Laura looked around at them and thought, _I’m one of you. Help me._ But if anyone had approached her she would have turned away. Jack came back with the drinks and sat down, passing them around. He drank a shot of whisky and said to Laura, “Well? How do you like tonight’s collection?” “Tonight’s collection of what?” Laura said. “Of nuts.” He looked around The Cellar. “Doesn’t anyone tell you anything, Mother? Burr, what’s the matter with you? She’s a tourist. Make with the old travelogue, boy.” Burr laughed. “I thought you didn’t get it, Laura.” He smiled. “They’re all queer.” Laura’s face went scarlet, but the candlelight hid it. She felt an awful tide of anger and fear come up in her at that word. She felt trapped, almost frantic, and she vented it on Jack. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she said. Her voice trembled with indignation. “Take it easy, Mother,” he said. “Tonight’s collection!” she mimicked bitterly. “You talk about them as if they were a bunch of animals.” “They are,” he said quietly. “So are we.” “We’re human beings,” she said. “We have no right to sit here and laugh at them for something they can’t help.” “Can’t help, hell,” Burr said, leaning over the table toward her. “All those gals need is a real man. That’d put them on the right track in a hurry.” Laura could have belted him. She wanted to shout, “How do you know, you big ape?” But she said instead, “You’re not irresistible, Burr.” “I don’t mean that!” he said, frowning at her. “Christ! I only mean a man who knows the first thing about women could lay any one of these dames—even a butch—and make her like it.”