... would get up and go over to the bed where Annette lay prostrate, with the sheets thrust up in a mountain by her crossed knees; and ... would fascinatedly watch the dull, heavy but strangely passionate face of the sleeper who was drowning in the ocean of her dreams.... She wanted to waken her abruptly and put her arms about her neck. “Wolf, are you there?” But she was too sure the wolf was there to try the experiment. Less pure and more normal than her elder sister, she played with fire, but she was not burned by it.[20] After Annette’s stormy introduction to heterosexual passion, however—(“That is love?... I don’t want any more. I’m not made for it!”)—they spend some weeks together, and now they were ruminating on their fever, their transports ... all that they had acquired and learned from each other during the preceding days. For this time they had given themselves completely, eager to take all and give all.[21] Their passion fights its way successfully through the phase of their desiring to dominate and possess one another: Their intimacy became so necessary to them that they wondered how they had ever done without it ... but the two little Rivières felt another, stronger need, that went deeper, to the very sources of their being: the need of independence.[22] The episode ends with Sylvie set up as a modiste, and Annette returning to social life in the intellectual circles her father had frequented, the two seeing one another less and less often. The second portion of the book records Annette’s experience with a highly eligible and attractive man whom she loves deeply. He and his family, however, hold the conventional view that a wife should be completely absorbed into her husband’s life and milieu, and as this threatens her independence she breaks the engagement, though she is so moved by her lover’s desolation that she gives herself to him before parting. Unable to yield completely either to man or woman, she would today be branded as a narcissist by psychoanalysts, but in the 1920s a major artist could still present with sympathy such a quest for individual integrity.