Alexandra was reading Heas manuscript.
"This," she said, pointing with her finger, "is inane."
Hea got up and looked over Alexandras shoulder at the sentence.
"Yes," she said. "I prefer the inane, sometimes. The ane is often inutile to the artist."
There was a moment of plation.
"I have been offered a thousand florins for it," Hea said. "The Dutch rights."
"How much is that in our money?"
"Two hundred sixty-six dollars."
"Bless Babel," Alexandra said, and took her friend in her arms.
Hea said: "Once I was a young girl, very much like any other young girl, ied in the same things, I was exemplary. I was told what I was, that is to say a young girl, and I knew what I was because I had been told and because there were other young girls all around me who had been told the same things and khe same things, and looking at them and hearing again in my head the things I had been told I knew what a young girl was. We had all been told the same things. I had not been told, for example, that some wine iss and some not and I had not been told. . . other things. Still I had been told a great many things all very useful but I had not been told that I was going to die in any way that would allow me to realize that I really was going to die and that it would be all over, then, and that this was all there was and that I had damned well better make the most of it. That I discovered for myself and covered with shame and shit as I was I made the most of it. I had not been told how to make the most of it but I figured it out. Then I moved through a period of depression, the depression engendered by the realization that I had placed myself beyond the pale, there I was, beyond the pale. Then I discovered that there were other people beyond the pale with me, that there were quite as many people on the wrong side of the pale as there were on the right side of the pale and that the people on the wrong side of the pale were as plex as the people on the right side of the pale, as unhappy, as subjee, as subject to death. So what the fuck? I said to myself in the colorful language I had learned on the wrong side of the pale. By this time I was no longer a young girl. I was mature."
Alexandra had a special devotion to the Sacred Heart.
THEORIES OF THE SACRED HEART
LOSS AND RECOVERY OF THE SACRED HEART
FLIG CLAIMS OF THE GREAT CATHEDRALS
THE SACRED HEART IN PORARY IOGRAPHY
APPEARANCE OF SPURIOUS SACRED HEARTS AND HOW THEY MAY BE DISTINGUISHED FROM THE TRUE ONE
LOCATION OF THE TRUE SACRED HEART REVEALED
HOW THE ABBE ST. GERMAIN PRESERVED THE TRUE SACRED HEART FROM THE HANDS OF THE BARBARIANS
WHY THE SACRED HEART IS FREQUENTLY REPRESENTED SURMOUNTED BY A OF THORNS
MEANING OF THE TINT TONGUE OF FLAME
ORDERS AND CEREMONIES IN THE VEION OF THE SACRED HEART
ROLE OF THE SACRED HEART SOCIETY IN THE VEION OF THE SACRED HEART
Alexandra was also a member of the Knights of St. Dympna, patroness of the insane.
Alexandra and Hea were walking dowreet in their long gowns. A man looked at them and laughed. Alexandra and Hea rushed at him and scratched his eyes out.
As a designer of artificial ruins, Alexandra was well-known. She designed ruins in the manners of Langley, Effner, Robert Adam and arni, as well as her own manner. She was w on a ruin for a park in Tempe, Arizona, sisting of a ruined wall nicely disied at the top and one end, two