A streetcar named Desire

“(Blanche)”He was a boy, just a boy, when I was a very young girl. When I was sixteen, I made the discovery—love. All at once and much, much too completely. It was like you suddenly turned a blinding light on something that had always been half in shadow, that’s how it struck the world for me. But I was unlucky. Deluded. There was somethign different about the boy, a nervousness, a softness and tenderness which wasn’t like a man’s, although he wasn’t the least bit effeminate looking—still—that thing was there…He came to me for help. I didn’t know that. I didn’t find out anything till after our marriage when we’d run away and come back and all I knew was I’d failed in him in some mysterious way adn wans’t able to give the help he needed but couldn’t speak of! He was in the quicksands and clutching at me—but I wasn’t holding him out, I was slipping in with him! I didn’t know that. I didn’t know anything except I loved him unendurably but without being ablle to help him or myself. Then I found out. In the worst of all possible ways. By coming suddenly into a room that I though was empty—which wans’t empty, but had two people in it…the boy I had married and an older man who had been his friend for years…”