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the same I feel extraordinarily exhilarated. You know, Di, I have searched for the miraculous all my life, in my austere fashion—Maxwell's demon is a god of sorts, and how else would any god manifest itself except by bringing about the occurrence of the vastly improbable? Tonight for the first time I believe my desire has achieved fruition or at least the illusion thereof. When I was a child—this is something I have told to very few people, Di, very very few—when I was a child I became enamoured of Greek mythology (Ovid's Metamorphoses was one of my first books) and in my loneliness I peopled the empty lots around my home and the park nearby with the deities and monsters of classic Greece. In a glade in the park (really a bare space behind some bushes) I reared rude altars (little more than shingles with flowers and bright trinkets and assorted childish treasures set on them as offerings) to Pan and Diana.
Yes, Di, to your namesake! To Diana, the slim moon-goddess, the virgin huntress. Much later it occurred to me that here I might have made a mistake (no, not a mistake precisely—I do not blaspheme your namesake, Di) in making my offerings to Diana rather than Venus, for no lovely young lady ever came to share my life. I have always been a votary of the chaste Silver One—Miss Silvers! What a night for coincidences!
Small wonder, really, that I remain celibate, for I was always singularly timid, credulous and inept in my very limited contacts with the opposite sex. Why, I was such a num-noddy in such matters, especially during my college years, that I was once cruelly hoaxed. I was accosted in the dormitory corridors by a slim and very pretty young lady who claimed to be in need of immediate assistance with her costume—a pin for her underskirt was wanted. In fear and secret delight I invited her into my room, where she lingered for an embarrassingly blissfully long time and finally wantonly approached me. A few moments later there was a chorus of laughter from a group of hidden eavesdroppers and the secret was out—the young lady was the "feminine" lead in the all-male Capers, or whatever they called their yearly show.
And that is something I have never told another soul. A distressful anecdote, really,