A couple of weeks ago, a librarian wrote to complain about her husband's loud and drunken family, and it drew a number of librarian letters protesting that folks in the profession are not so obsessed about order and that some of them enjoy being loud and drunk, too. The best letter comes from a librarian who writes:

"I was on the nude beach at Martinique a few years back with my husband and two other couples. We were chatting with some other naked folks, when one man asked me what I did for a living. I told him that I was a librarian. 'Funny,' he said, 'you don't look like a librarian.' We all had a good laugh."

This, from a woman who has read letters here from women afraid because they tend to scare off men: "I am 6 feet tall in heels and strong enough to go on 400-mile bike rides and I love to fence. Strong women need to meet men by doing the things that make them strong. Men who fence like women fencers. Men who bicycle 400 miles like women who can too. Do the things you're strong at and you will meet men who are looking for those strengths. Never get involved with a man who wants to make your life smaller. Women are intimidating only to men who can be intimidated."

Many readers wrote in last week taking sharp exception to the advice to Lady in Waiting (actually, the advice of a woman friend of mine whom I quoted), the lady who is in love with a man and hopes to marry him, though he doesn't want children and she does. The readers felt that my friend was advising her to trick the guy into having children. But that wasn't my friend's advice at all: Her advice was to make him responsible for the birth control and let events take their course. Her feeling was that men want to have sex and expect women to make the arrangements, and that if the man is made the Controller of Birth, he will in the end forgo the bother of condoms and opt for fatherhood. Her opinion, not mine, but I thought it worth quoting.

It would be cynical, of course, to make a guy a daddy unawares. On the other hand, if you absolutely don't want to go to Chicago, why get on the Chicago train and assume it makes intermediate stops? Comprende? Sometimes daddyhood happens. And in my dark Midwestern view of things, it seems to me that great blessings most often come to us unawares.

Dear Mr. Blue,

I am madly in love with a wonderful man. He is madly in love with me. We cut through the thick fog of racial difference (I'm black; he's white) and hurdled a generation gap (he's 10 years younger) to find out that we make each other genuinely and deeply happy. My parents like him and his like me. We've been together for six months and want to make a life together.

If there's a catch, it is that my partner is jealous. He gets extremely upset about the fact that I have good friends (in the present) with whom I was at one time sexually involved (in the past). He is jealous if I describe meeting a man who is fascinating or fun or smart. I am deeply committed to this relationship. I've never been so happy. But I need to feel trusted. Is the jealousy a sign of future problems, or just an early phase that we have to work through? Am I asking too much of him to want him to accept my friends?

Surprised by Joy

Dear Surprised,

Jealousy seems quite natural for a gentleman in the throes of romance, at least in this early stage, and I doubt there's much he can do to stifle it. He is committed to you and one sign of it is this growly attitude toward other dogs. It's all very enlightened and liberal to stay friends with old lovers, but it's natural for him to want to run these guys off and mark your yard with urine. It'd be odd if he didn't. Were I in his shoes, I'd say, "Woman, Light of My Life, Heart of My Heart, ditch these weenies because they're driving me nuts. I can be nice to them but I don't really mean it. No matter how polite they and I appear to be, we will read each other as rivals. Out with the old and in with the new. Amscray." So that'd be my advice. Let the exes take a powder and maybe later they can trickle back, one by one, and be friends again. Men with half a brain, it seems to me, would understand this.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"