Adam's Breed by Radclyffe Hall — Read

Gian-Luca was usually quite happy in the darkness, after Teresa had put out the light. The darkness had never held terrors for him; he liked it, he found it friendly. Moreover, when he closed his eyes and lay half dozing, he would sometimes see pictures inside his head; vivid and clear and beautiful they were, like a landscape after spring rain. Gian-Luca knew something of trees and grass -- once or twice he had been on excursions out of London with Rosa and her husband -- but nothing he had seen then came up to his pictures; the only trouble was that they faded away if he so much as drew breath. In Gian-Luca's pictures there were wide green spaces, and once there had been running water; sometimes there were low-lying, faraway hills, and sometimes a kind of beautiful gloom -- green, from the leaves that made it. The pictures were happy, intensely happy, and Gian-Luca grew happy as he saw them. By the next day, however, he had always forgotten their most alluring details; he would have to wait until he went to bed again, and then the darkness would remind him; back would come memory and sometimes new pictures, and that was why he liked the darkness.

Tonight, however, the pictures would not come, though he shut his eyes and waited. The act of shutting his eyes disturbed him, it reminded him suddenly of Nonna. Nonna had stared down into his eyes; she had felt his hair too, and had said things about it -- she had said things about his hair and his eyes, things that he had not understood. For a moment, when her hand had rested on his head, he had thought that she meant to caress him; Nonna was not at all given to caresses, still, for one moment he had thought. Well, then he had realized, without knowing how, that Nonna was not being kind -- she was not being actually unkind either, only -- she hated his hair. He lay and pondered these things, bewildered, and his heart felt afraid because of its love. It was dreadful to love a goddess like Nonna -- a goddess who hated your hair --