“Do it hurt?” she repeated. “Oh, I bet it does. Deed it does.” Mannix looked up at her across the short yards that separated them, silent, blinking. Culver would remember this: the two of them communicating across that chasm one unspoken moment of sympathy and understanding before the woman, spectacled, bandannaed, said again, “Deed it does,” and before, almost at precisely the same instant, the towel slipped away slowly from Mannix’s waist and fell with a soft plop to the floor; Mannix then, standing there, weaving dizzily and clutching for support at the wall, a mass of scars and naked as the day he emerged from his mother’s womb, save for the soap which he held feebly in one hand. He seemed to have neither the strength nor the ability to lean down and retrieve the towel and so he merely stood there huge and naked in the slanting dusty light and blinked and sent toward the woman, finally, a sour, apologetic smile, his words uttered, it seemed to Culver, not with self-pity but only with the tone of a man who, having endured and lasted, was too weary to tell her anything but what was true. “Deed it does,” he said. [Illustration] ABOUT THE AUTHOR William Styron was born in Newport News, Virginia. He served three years in the United States Marine Corps, and after the war, returned to complete his studies at Duke University. _Lie Down in Darkness_, William Styron’s first novel, appeared in 1951. For that initial work, he was awarded the Prix de Rome of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Two years later his short novel, _The Long March_, was published, followed by Set _This House on Fire_ (1960) and _The Confessions of Nat Turner_ (1967). Mr. Styron, his wife and four children live in Roxbury, Connecticut.