350 julie abraham ence the loneliness of the city and its embrace simultaneously, because of the experience of deviance In The Well, as in Park’s great city, the reward of Paris is “communal life” (406), but this reward depends on the deviant’s acceptance of herself as deviant, and her deviance as defining her self As Stephen acknowledges, “in Paris I might make some sort of a home, I could work here—and then of course there are people” (248) “People” make possible Stephen’s home and work in Paris; her meeting Valérie Seymour prompts her to stay in the city, and Valérie literally finds her a home Nevertheless it is a grim moment, when Stephen Gordon “turn[s] at last to her own kind,” and launches herself and Mary Llewellyn upon “the stream that flows silent and deep through all great cities, gliding on between precipitous borders, away and away into no-man’s land—the most desolate country in all creation” (356) Hall introduces the prospect of community as a loss Stephen’s former governess, Puddle, who first accompanies her to London and Paris, inveighs against “like to like”: “No, no Stephen was honourable and courageous; she was steadfast in friendship and selfless in loving; intolerable to think that her only companions must be men and women like Jonathan Brockett” (242) To take up with such companions—by definition neither “honourable” nor “courageous,” “steadfast” nor “selfless”—is, Puddle implies, to move definitively out of the normal moral world Park’s analysis confirms her fears Once “the poor, the vicious, the criminal, and exceptional persons generally” have joined with their own kind, he observes, “social contagion tends to stimulate the[ir] common temperamental differences and to suppress characters which unite them with the normal types about them” (129) Stephen’s profound ambivalence about lesbian/gay/queer communal life is based in her sense of her self She worries “that [Valérie] liked me because she thought me—oh, well, because she thought me what I am” (248) In order to consider the friendship of those “like” herself, she has to acknowledge “what” she is That is, she has to admit a stigmatized identity and to admit that stigmatized identity as defining But intimacy might still be elusive; she might be “liked” by those “like” herself only for “what” she is Such a connection would inevitably be superficial, insofar as she understands herself as having a self that exceeds her deviance Hall’s and Park’s works, perhaps because they were each negotiating social hostilities—to homosexuality and to the city—finally converge on