She nodded her head affirmatively and went on smiling. "What attracts me--sexually--to people--isn't their sex. Not whether they're men or women--or even little kids, for that matter. It's something about them that I never know what it may be. The way they move--or the way they talk--or their expressions--or their looks. It can be any little thing. Sometimes I think it isn't _them_ at all--but how _I_ feel at the time. And even then my feelings aren't ever the same. According to what it is that attracts me, I'm different. Sometimes I see a man I'd like to have make love to me. Sometimes I see some college boy I'd just like to neck. Sometimes I see a woman I wish would have a crush on me and rush me--like college girls--and get herself terribly upset about wanting me around so much--and not knowing what to do. And sometimes I feel the way Charmaine seems to, about everybody she likes. I just try to see how excited I can make them be--and then let them be. Like that. Let them go away. Does it bore you?" "No." "There are some feelings I can't react to. Homosexuality in men. I don't mean it revolts me, or anything. I just can't see why they bother--even with all I _can_ see. And the most peculiar part is noticing that the men who hate pansies the most are nearest to it. You find that out, in my kind of life. They'll visit you and act strictly like Marine sergeants--and get very tight--and finally, perhaps, ask--probably pretending to kid--if there are only girls around the place. When anything like that happens--I feel perfectly blank. Yet that doesn't seem--normal--under the circumstances." Gwen's theory of normal libido required the possibility of erotic reaction to just about any object, it appeared. I wondered how close that was to the actual nature of us all. The Freudians would have shrugged it off as adolescent. A carrying-into-maturity of the unsorted, unspecialized yearnings of the infant and the child. I felt that--if a person could choose--he, or she, would be far better off with Gwen's libido than the tormented fragment that the majority cherished. Cherished as the platform for all that they called love and integrity. She was telling the truth. But presently I wondered if she had not told it a great many times, to men like myself, and to women--some women. Told it as a psychological tapestry against which to pose herself; as an advertisement, an inducement. It wouldn't be the first time I'd heard a prostitute do that. Tell the truth readily enough--too readily. Personal history--anecdotes--subclinical material. Intellectual people would fall for it. They would be seduced by it. For they have been deprived not just of the erotic play their childhood naturally yearned for but, in most cases, of the opportunity for mere discussion of the subject, which they'd have enjoyed.