The Well of Loneliness

And their love affairs, how strange, how bewildering -- how difficult to classify degrees of attraction. For not always would they attract their own kind, very often they attracted quite ordinary people. Thus Pat's Arabella had suddenly married, having wearied of Grigg as of her predecessor. Rumour had it that she was now blatantly happy at the prospect of shortly becoming a mother. And then there was Jamie's friend Barbara, a wisp of a girl very faithful and loving, but all woman as far as one could detect, with a woman's clinging dependence on Jamie.

These two had been lovers from the days of their childhood, from the days when away in their Highland village the stronger child had protected the weaker at school or at play with their boisterous companions. They had grown up together like two windswept saplings on their bleak Scottish hillside so starved of sunshine. For warmth and protection they had leaned to each other, until with the spring, at the time of mating, their branches had quietly intertwined. That was how it had been, the entwining of saplings, very simple, and to them very dear, having nothing mysterious or strange about it except inasmuch as all love is mysterious.