When Claire contracts tuberculosis, Marie takes her to the Mediterranean coast and acts as housekeeper and nurse to her socially-inferior beloved. Far from being grateful, the girl puts her benefactrice through some bitter hours, although she does soften before dying. Returning alone to Vermont, Marie discovers that her eccentric benevolence has only fed the ugly legends about her until the girl’s death is credited to their intimacy, and she is completely ostracized. She responds with contempt, buying strong tobacco at the village shop, riding astride as no other Vermont woman has ever done, and laughing in the faces of those who cut her. This blatant defiance ultimately provokes retaliation from the town’s riff-raff, friends of Claire’s soldier-suitor, so that her property and person are no longer safe and she is forced into complete seclusion with only books for company. Now, for the first time, she learns the nature of her own difference. She recognizes that from earliest childhood she has found men ridiculous and revolting; that women have provided the only interest in her life; moreover, that there was a certain resemblance between all the faces that had attracted her; it was the same shade of melancholy, the same emotion of a disappointed soul.... Whenever she saw on a woman’s face ... a certain regret, a yearning look ... she felt a tug at her heart; she wanted to rise up and offer herself as if she had been created to be the guardian of a plant too fragile....[26] Made conscious also of possible physical intimacy between women, and knowing herself already branded in the town’s eyes as guilty of it, she goes through a period of acute temptation, and is restrained from making advances to a shopgirl only by the latter’s murmuring at a critical moment a phrase that Claire had often used.