But when she lay down in the dark she couldn’t sleep. It’s so awful to have to go through this alone, she thought—like dying, I suppose. Whom could she ask? Talk with? Would Betsy Goodwin know? There was “the pill”—but how did one get it? For Joel it just seemed natural, and he talked so much about how society kept people from being themselves, made them produce things they didn’t need and consume things they didn’t need, like some big cruel machine. But what if sex were a kind of machine too? And once you got caught in it, you couldn’t go back ever. Or was it more like taking a horse over a jump, and you just had to grit your teeth and do it or fail? All Cathy knew was that her body was doing things to her she couldn’t understand, and had ceased to be the friendly, affectionate thing she wanted it to be. Now her body had become the enemy, for when she remembered Joel’s tongue in her mouth she felt all prickly and strange, and, most of all, not whole, for one part of her liked it and some other part, deep down, was revolted. I’m having to suffer powers in me I didn’t know I had, she thought—powers I can’t control. That’s what is so frightening.

“Oh please, God,” she murmured, “tell me what to do and how to be.”

CHRISTINA’S JOURNAL—May 8

I am having the most horrible struggle trying to get that chapter finished for Jem. The deadline is May twentieth. All I want is to get outdoors, and instead I sit at the desk upstairs and struggle along, and it just isn’t good. Even with Cornelius’s help it turns into a mass of detail and none of it feels alive. And I feel I am letting down those great women who should come alive and take the reader with them to China or into the heart of their adventure during the Civil War. The only one I manage to come to terms with is Jane. Because I knew her, I suppose.