Constance enjoys broiling lamb. She uses a little lemon, a little crushed garlic--Babe likes it that way too. Babe has donned the garment she favors for these nights: some discarded costume she found backstage after a spanking, it is a sleeveless shift of light chain mail falling not quite halfway down her thighs, slightly rust-stained where it swells below her navel. Alone in the kitchen, she and Constance share a leisurely candlelit meal. The kaleidoscope of Babe's insufferability falls still when there is no one else about--she relaxes with Constance. They chat about the campus news and the library's latest acquisitions; Babe tells about her day, which she spent teaching Shakespeare at a private Quaker school; Constance describes the day's Admissions tours and the families she met. It would appear to be a night like any other, were it not for the dress, and their frequent blushes.

"By the way, Babe," Constance hazards, "Marise still wants you to come see her."

"You're joking! That girl must have trench mouth by now."

"She's very clean and extremely adept. Besides, I've been to her and it makes me uncomfortable that you won't go too. It's as if you're casting some sort of judgement."

"Judgement has nothing to do with it, Constance. I'm a whore like everyone else in Damnation--I'm just a non-practicing whore. I don't mind your going to Marise."

"But I don't want to go to Marise! I want you to go."

"Why?" Babe seems genuinely perplexed. "Don't you want me for yourself?"

"If that were an option--"

"Of course it's an option."

"And her? You'd make her give you up?"

"That's different. That's something utterly different."

Here they go again. Constance cannot get around the junkie headmistress, however hard she tries, however many times she tells herself it doesn't matter. Devotion to such spurious authority, submission to a will so self-poisoned, existence without any ambition to dominate, to seek some cleansing revenge--she hates this in Babe. Marise is right: Babe is not normal.