The Well of Loneliness

Stephen rested her head on her hand as she sat at her desk -- it was well past midnight. She was heartsick as only a writer can be whose day has been spent in useless labour. All that she had written that day she would destroy, and now it was well past midnight. She turned, looking wearily round the study, and it came upon her with a slight sense of shock that she was seeing this room for the very first time, and that everything in it was abnormally ugly. The flat had been furnished when her mind had been too much afflicted to care in the least what she bought, and now all her possessions seemed clumsy or puerile, from the small, foolish chairs to the large, roll-top desk; there was nothing personal about any of them. How had she endured this room for so long? Had she really written a fine book in it? Had she sat in it evening after evening and come back to it morning after morning? Then she must have been blind indeed -- what a place for any author to work in! She had taken nothing with her from Morton but the hidden books found in her father's study; these she had taken, as though in a way they were hers by some intolerable birthright; for the rest she had shrunk from depriving the house of its ancient and honoured possessions.

Morton -- so quietly perfect a thing, yet the thing of all others that she must fly from, that she must forget; but she could not forget it in these surroundings; they reminded by contrast. Curious what Brockett had said that evening about putting the sea between herself and England. In view of her own half-formed plan to do so, his words had come as a kind of echo of her thoughts; it was almost as though he had peeped through a secret keyhole into her mind, had been spying upon her trouble. By what right did this curious man spy upon her -- this man with the soft, white hands of a woman, with the movements befitting those soft, white hands, yet so ill-befitting the rest of his body? By no right; and how much had the creature found out when his eye had been pressed to that secret keyhole? Clever -- Brockett was fiendishly clever -- all his whims and his foibles could not disguise it. His face gave him away, a hard, clever face with sharp eyes that were glued to other people's keyholes. That was why Brockett wrote such fine plays, such cruel plays; he fed his genius on live flesh and blood. Carnivorous genius. Moloch, fed upon live flesh and blood! But she, Stephen, had tried to feed her inspiration upon herbage, the kind, green herbage of Morton. For a little while such food had sufficed, but now her talent had sickened, was dying perhaps -- or had she too fed it on blood, her heart's blood when she had written The Furrow? If so, her heart would not bleed any more -- perhaps it could not -- perhaps it was dry. A dry, withered thing; for she did not feel love these days when she thought of Angela Crossby -- that must mean that her heart had died within her. A gruesome companion to have, a dead heart.