Explore "The Well of Loneliness" by Radclyffe Hall on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Pacing restlessly up and down her bedroom, Stephen would be thinking of Angela Crossby -- haunted, tormented by Angela's words that day in the garden: "Could you marry me, Stephen? " and then by those other pitiless words: "Can I help it if you're -- what you obviously are?"
She would think with a kind of despair: "What am I in God's name -- some kind of abomination? " And this thought would fill her with very great anguish, because, loving much, her love seemed to her sacred. She could not endure that the slur of those words should come anywhere near her love. So now night after night she must pace up and down, beating her mind against a blind problem, beating her spirit against a blank wall -- the impregnable wall of non-comprehension: "Why am I as I am -- and what am I? " Her mind would recoil while her spirit grew faint. A great darkness would seem to descend on her spirit -- there would be no light wherewith to lighten that darkness.