The Price of Salt price paid by Lot's wife when she looked back towards Sodom. It's more likely, however, that she was invoking a biblical reference from the Gospel text () that André Gide included in his novel "The Counterfeiters", a work about the transgressive love of adolescence that Highsmith once took to heart: If the salt have lost his flavor wherewith shall it be salted?'—that is the tragedy with which I am concerned." Highsmith's publisher, Harper & Bros, rejected the manuscript. Her agent warned her that she was committing career suicide by following "Strangers on a Train" with a blatantly lesbian novel. It
The Mouse Turned into a Maid man and his cat", while in the Latin explanatory text it reads "De Cata in Fœminam mutate" (The cat changed into a woman). Jean de la Fontaine wrote a separate version of this fable, also under the title "The cat changed into a woman" ("La chatte metamorphosée en femme", II.18), in which he gave the theme of change an extended, thoughtful treatment: Though La Fontaine avoided mention of Venus as the intermediary for the change in his fable, she is there in Christopher Pitt's "The Fable of the Young Man and his Cat", which is turned into a satirical picture