For a time she had been largely sufficient unto herself. For a time Deborah and what Deborah wanted her to be did not bother her for more than a passing, inconvenient moment; she was better and stronger than that. But her disregard, rather than active dislike, for her brother Leon was involvement of a kind. Her complex feelings about her father represented a truer and deeper involvement. When he lived, she wanted to love and to avoid him at the same time, to say in essence: “I love you, leave me alone.” When he died, the love and avoidance became grief and anger and guilt. No one dies without someone living feeling guilt. Whatever; another loss of purity.

Then there was what she had seen between Leon and Clovis, and what had happened after—Leon’s being away at school which, she knew, was only another way of keeping him away from home because of what he had done. There was the child Clovis had after her marriage to Roscoe, a pale, twisted thing, standing in Selma’s mind for the wrongness of what she had seen happen between the two whose physical union resulted in his creation.

There was Aunt Nell and the way she made her body and mind lie to accommodate social conventions that offended her nature. There was Aunt Nell’s very kindness—not, to be sure, a thing that ever put her out very much or that she allowed to get the upper hand of her. Still, it was there. Aunt Nell could not, Selma saw, be as selfish and private as she would have liked. And part of the reason for that was that Uncle Felix who, although a scoundrel by ordinary standards of behavior, was other things besides a scoundrel: a disappointed husband, a kind and foolish man with needs that had to do with nothing and no one but himself. So, Aunt Nell, with an almost perfect selfishness, could not be entirely true even to her own selfishness. Why would people interfere? Why would they interpose their qualities, good or bad, that made it impossible for a woman to be true to herself? Better the isolated selfishness than the meaningless involvements that turned aside honesty, fragmented the true self.