Solidarity to Lenu is both a dream and a nightmare; she wants to join in, but she is too afraid to relinquish her unique self to give in to the triumphal we that Jill highlighted in Balestrini. To her, that “we” is irreconcilable with the solitude of independent being or, more specifically, the desired solitude of the autonomous female being. For increasingly, as she walks through the mass of protesters looking for a familiar face or name (her own), Lent finds it particularly hard to articulate the women from the mass or from each other. She sees men in passing and notes them individually as “handsome, ugly, well-dressed, scruffy, violent, frightened, amused,” yet the women she sees “stayed close together ... they shouted together, laughed together, and if they were separated by even a few meters they kept an eye on each other so as not to get lost” (TWL, 69). Only a few individuals “by themselves or at most in pairs,” move amongst the groups of men, and they are marked by their hard-won distinction from the other women: “they seemed to me the happiest, the most aggressive, the proudest.” It is 1968 and while Lent struggles to absorb “the lesson from France,” she is deeply terrified by the idea of losing the distinctly singular, female self she has worked so hard (albeit confusedly) to keep cleanly defined and bounded, in order to join the massed bodies of implicitly male solidarity.