Free Let Me Alone by Anna Kavan

would keep you on your mettle.
    Anna felt again, as she had already felt, that Rachel was making her soft, almost victimising her. She was not standing on her own feet. And it seemed to her that Sidney, with her very quick amber eyes had discerned this and was mocking her.
    Anna wanted to be friends with Sidney, but Rachel monopolized all her attention. She felt herself in a quandary. It was not easy to break away from Rachel. She did not really want to lose that warm, glorifying passion of tenderness the big, vivid woman was capable of. For her, Rachel was still the goddess, powerful, benevolent, full-limbed, mysterious with a strange power of exaltation and a luxuriant physical magic. Rachel was the goddess-woman to whom she owed her passionate loyalty and gratitude and devotion.
    But then she had to reckon with the influence of Sidney, pulling her, pulling her in another direction. Pulling heraway. That was what Sidney was doing all the time, under cover of her ironical indifference, pulling her away from Rachel. Trying to force a new liberty upon her. To take away from her the deistic protection of Rachel’s benevolence.
    ‘I admire Rachel enormously,’ she heard the deep quiet, humorous voice of Sidney asserting. ‘I’m fond of her too. But only in homeopathic doses. I can’t stand much of her at a time. She’s too rich for me, too rich for my blood.’
    Anna felt that she was laughing at her and her relations with Rachel. Hard, clean-cut, sharp-tongued, bracing, mocking Sidney, without gentleness or mercy; Sidney with her gruff voice and her curious wild charm; how strange a rival for the goddess!
    But a formidable rival the sturdy, dark girl was. She had a poisoned dart of power against Rachel in her boyish body. The power to make the ripe, glorious woman a little ridiculous.
    Like a goddess, Rachel appeared beside her, a rich, golden goddess in all the glory of maturity, with a gorgeous, almost voluptuous fullness. Sidney brought out the goddess-ship, the strange physical goddess-ship of Rachael, by contrast with her own youthful, sharp-outlined simplicity, her own hardness.
    This was what she tried to do. And it made Anna uncomfortable. The overflowing, soft femininity had always been a little repulsive to her. Now it became also a little absurd, a little embarrassing. She could not bear the warm glisten of tenderness in the big, hazel eyes; or the large, soft, white hands that touched her yearningly with a mysterious soft urgency, possessive. The whole semi-physical spell of the goddess-ship of Rachel had become abhorrent to her.
    She gave more and more of her time to Sidney. Rachel said nothing; she would not compete or complain. She had, very much, her dignified pride. But she looked at Anna with darkened eyes, as much as to say that though she would not reproach her the default was bitter.
    She watched Anna at first with a kind of hopefulness: on her soft, warm face, and in her hazel eyes was an expression of tender, rather pathetic expectation. She could not believe that she had lost her battle. She was the goddess; the mystery. How should she fail to conquer?
    Yes, Rachel was used to looking upon herself as a goddess. But suddenly her divine right was questioned; and by this young limb of a Sidney. Sidney to win a victory over the goddess, to steal away an adorer! What a humiliation!
    Rachel did not like it at all. And presently a flame of indignation was lighted in her large eyes. The tenderness, the melancholy softness, died out, and indignation took its place. She left Anna alone.
    Anna was glad to get out of the temple, to get away from the spell of the fascination and the mystery, out into the fresh air. But she went out with something added to her by the mysteries; a strong conceit in herself, the nightmare pushed well away into the background.
    She very quickly became intimate with Sidney. The intimacy which had budded between them at their first conversation blossomed rapidly into a sort of