I came out of the office with the papers and Star was there waiting forme. "All sorted?" I nodded.She dropped to one knee and presenting me with a sma...l box, opened itand said, "Jade will you make me the happiest girl in the world?" Ilooked in the box and saw a ring to match the one we had bought her butwith jade replacing the star sapphire. I burst into tears and couldbarely stammer "Yyess."I told her what I had in mind to do, and how nervous I was about it. "Ifwe can swing it, I'll come with. No one would have believed me, and if I had ever published any of this, I would have been laughed out of academia." Earl has shown me some of the things that you write." He looked at me over the top of his glasses. His eyes were now a very bright blue. "I think you will understand... and I am sure that you can tell my story to the world. I no longer care what my fellow professors think of me. They can put it down to death-bed lunacy..... but it is the truth..... the absolute, god-awful,. I thought it was just talk. Just like in the novels I read at the time: boys messed a bit with girls a little older but didn’t end up getting much action. When it came to actual sex, they got rejected, but what they imagined they might get, got me hard.Sofia was no story.She was real. She worked at the boardinghouse. She made the beds; took linen to the laundry room; hung it. She did everything in that gray skirt that reached her knees and that memorable little white blouse and the beige. ‘Okay,’ he laughed again, and went on: ‘I was thinking that we could deal with those kinds of situations by me carrying a camera around with me, to get it on film for posterity!’ He laughed again, and she joined him in the laugh. ‘Beastly man!’ she said, ‘Typical!’ Then her expression changed and she said earnestly: ‘Jim, I loved that girl of mine to distraction but I can’t for the life of me understand what would cause her, why she would ever want to leave a wonderful man like you, and those.