Marya’s attention was a cat’s attention, now. Whatever she wanted most held her utterly, so that she abandoned emphatically anything other than the object of her fixation. And then something new would appear and she clapped it with the same impenetrable stare. She knew herself, how she had slowly, over years, become a cat, a wolf, a snake, anything but a girl. How she had wrung out her girlhood like a death.
