“Rae was so angry at everybody by then she wouldn’t let anybody even try to speak to her. There was nobody. Nobody till Pete Tonely showed up with some of Ray’s business friends. He was so different. Younger, and really handsome. He didn’t hound her and paw her like Roy’s friends tried to, but she knew he noticed her a lot. The day after she turned eighteen and found that Sears Roebuck had turned her off from her warehouse job there, Pete had come over. He said something nice to her, and she started crying. She made herself stop crying right away, and they sat out on the back steps talking for a long time. He said, ‘Rae, I came over to tell you I’m pulling up stakes. Going to Denver. Tonight.’ She just sat there, dumb. He took her hand and said, ‘Listen, I want to take you out of this. If you want to come. I thought about going on to Frisco.’ She met him down at the train station that night.

The first year had a lot of excitement in it, and joy. She didn’t forget that. But poor Pete was always finding wonderful new friends and new prospects and then they didn’t pan out. He got fired, or he quit. As time went on, it seemed like nothing satisfied him anymore. He was never hard on her, but the joy was all gone out of it. A few months after they got anywhere, he was always talking about pulling up stakes. When they were in Chico, he’d met some man from a mining town who told him what a great job bartending was, and good money in the tips. And so she’d ended up in Goldorado. Still on the outside.”
—“Pity and Shame,” Ursula K. Le Guin