[...] But possibilities of communication with members of her own sex were rarer and more uncertain, unlike the perilous ease of encounters with men; and a distrust—reciprocal this time—blocked such communication. Most of the women went by in catamarans accompanied by men, and they were jealous, inaccessible, seeking the open sea, where the body, whose shame she suffered passively, would for them be the weapon of an aggressive and calculable strategy. Now and then a boat came out packed with chirping, overheated young girls, and the signora thought of the distance between the profound vulgarity of her suffering and their volatile heedlessness; she thought of how she would have to repeat her appeal to them, because they surely wouldn't understand her the first time; she thought of how their expression would change at the news, and she couldn't bring herself to call out to them. A blonde also went by in a catamaran, alone, tanned, full of smugness and egoism; surely she was going far out to take the sun completely naked, and it would never remotely occur to her that nakedness could be a misfortune or a torment. Signora Isotta realized then how alone a woman is, and how rare, among her own kind, is solidarity, spontaneous and good (destroyed perhaps by the pact made with man), which would have foreseen her appeals and come to her side at the merest hint in the moment of a secret misfortune no man would understand. Women would never save her; and her own man was away. She felt her strength abandoning her.