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Show Acting Alone Page 455 he had developed an ounce of respect for the exclostrated woman standing so nakedly before him now; and that he had elected tact as an approach to her. It was as though he'd already forgotten about their former slave/massa relationship. And yet, even so, there was a definite sensation of this being Polly's final command performance for the mousy priest. At the age of thirty-eight or -nine Chaplain Wagstaff Bopp had apparently developed a curiosity about certain goings-on among laypeople. He was interested in vicariously living this special aspect of secular life through Polly, formerly Sister Polycarpana. He seemed to hunger and yearn in a pathetic, almost innocent kind of way. Bopp had decided to take this private time in the destroyed sacristy to grill her, when technically he should have been the one performing the service here: he should have been dispensing the wise touchie-feelie counseling it was his job to give at times like these - the counseling which she'd never valued or needed, anyway. Supposedly a counselor versed by profession in the problems of lay life (though how he could have learned anything about such problems as a priest was a mystery to Polly), Bopp could never get intimate with his counselees as he could, as on command, with a woman formerly in his charge. Polly presumed that he'd already fabricated an inner excuse for this importuning, which he wasn't bothering to enunciate to a mere woman. Perhaps he told himself that he was delving deliberately into Polly's personal affairs in order to deepen his capabilities as a priest and dispenser of wisdom. It was almost as though he himself had finally come around to recognizing the patent ridiculousness of a celibate's advising people on sex, |