The time approaches that will explain Babe to Constance--she feels its approach. Tonight's will be their seventeenth act of lovemaking. Constance thinks back to the occasion of their first: she was fourteen, and they were living in North Residence, Constance one floor below her affable but ever-distant idol. (Although young for Vice, she had transferred there to be near Babe.) It was fall; it was the night the clocks turn back. Constance had spent her Saturday studying for mid-terms and feeling an uncanny doubleness develop in her mind the more she studied: for with every fact she mastered, every proof she mounted, every subtle connection she drew to its attenuated end, vivid reveries of Babe would overtake her like importunate prizes; later in the day, whenever her attention wavered, physical desires for Babe began to rush in, torrential, overwhelming everything, as if they'd been accumulating in the margins while Constance attended to the letters on the page; finally learning became sexual torment and forced closed her books. This had never happened to Constance before--she had always been a good student. Now it seemed she would have to drop out of school. Dazed and exhausted, she decided she'd leave in the morning. It was late; she reached to turn her clock back and paused. Time, in a sense, had stopped. She closed her eyes and awoke upstairs in Babe's room, standing by her bed, looking down at the coverlet and a volume of Gide that Babe was holding shut around her left forefinger. Babe had been speaking; Babe's voice had awakened her. "Hey little lady, are you there? Cousin? Constance?" Constance blinked and looked at Babe. Inclining towards her from the covers in a blue t-shirt that matched her eyes, which wore an expression of tender amazement, Babe was looking at her breasts. "Nude somnambulism!," she breathed appreciatively. "Stop that, Babe," said Constance. Laughing, the older girl met her gaze. "You've never rebuked me before," she said. "Are you still asleep?" "Do you enjoy rebuke?," asked Constance. Babe paused, as if weighing a choice of saying too much against a chance of losing face, and then replied, "I enjoy submitting to authority." Constance advanced. "I want you," she told Babe, "to do something for my concentration."