It was like running one’s face against a granite wall in the darkness! It was shocking; it was horrible. Not for herself. She felt only how Sally was being mauled already, maltreated; she felt his hostility; his jealousy; his determination to break their companionship. “Oh this horror!” she said to herself, as if she had known all along that something would interrupt, would embitter her moment of happiness.[51] There is no further reference in the novel to Sally, and Clarissa Dalloway lives on for us into her mid-fifties, wife and mother, never again in such intimate touch with life, unless it is in her relation to her daughter. For although above she has said that the charm of a girl never moves her, her love for the eighteen-year-old Elizabeth is the most vital element in her current existence. The girl is undergoing a spell of inexplicable devotion to a shabby, unkempt, embittered woman tutor, for whom Mrs. Dalloway finds it difficult to repress a burning hatred, and one realizes that this hatred is but the obverse of the emotion she will not recognize for the beautiful daughter so different from herself and so aloof. The reader will remember that in the other strand of the dual narrative Septimus Smith, shell-shock case from World War I, fails to regain his mental balance or to respond to his devoted wife because he cannot admit to consciousness the love he felt for a fellow-officer who was killed. In her preface, the author says that Smith is intended to be Clarissa Dalloway’s “double,” and that in its first conception the story, lacking him, ended with Mrs. Dalloway’s death. It would seem that her contribution here to the problem of variance is the possibility of its being a happy experience where innocence is easy—as for a woman; but for a man too scrupulous to accept the almost inevitable outcome in the male, it may be fatal. It is a radical step from _Mrs. Dalloway_ to the forthright _Tortoiseshell Cat_, in which a lesbian woman plays a sinister part. The central figure, a motherless girl in her late twenties, is still a pristine innocent, thanks to her exclusive devotion to a scholarly father lost a short time before. Gillian is baffled by her worldly-wise younger sister’s hold upon men, and by the quixotic devotion of a girl who leaves her private school in protest when Gillian (a teacher there) is dismissed. It is this innocence which cost her her teaching position—she chose French poetry to read aloud on the basis of its beauty alone, genuinely unaware of its sexual connotations—and presently it leads her into even more serious danger. After her sister’s marriage, left alone in a dreary residence club and bored with a part-time secretaryship, she meets a fellow resident, half American and completely bohemian and fascinating. The initial encounter is significant: