Colette's painting circa 1896 by Jacques Humbert
"She's made of steel!"
She's simply "made of woman", and that's sufficient.
Loneliness...freedom...my pleasing and labourious work as a mime and dancer...my happy, tired muscles, the new concern (which relaxes me from the old one) of earning my own food, clothing and rent...all this immediately became my lot in life, but I also acquired a wild mistrust, a distaste for the milieu in which I had lived and suffered, a stupid fear of man, of men, and of women, too...A morbid need to be unaware of what was going on around me, (...)And another peculiarity took hold of me very quickly: I feel isolated and protected from my fellow human beings only when on stage - the barrier of the footlights keeping me safe from everybody..."

In "The Vagabond", by Colette

Any resemblance with my own reality is NOT a coincidence.;)