A prologue incorporates the two men’s rapid survey of previous literature on female variance, from classical references through Catholic confessors’ manuals to Balzac, Gautier, and Baudelaire. Sappho’s influence, Tammuz decides, operated in so segregated a community of girls as to engender the cathartic intrasexual play common in such environments. In short, ‘Lesbos is the story of a pagan convent.’ The Catholic literature, of course, supports the thesis that lesbianism is merely ‘female sodomy.’ So also do belletristic works from Brantôme to Diderot. _The Girl with the Golden Eyes_ is pronounced Balzac’s weakest effort because it represents lesbian passion as a motivating force for murder. Gautier gives them momentary pause, because _Mlle de Maupin_ records lesbian activity between two women of high social status; however, it is the Catholic Baudelaire who offers them the most convincing evidence that the lesbian experience may approach real passion. Tammuz claims that such error merely foreshadowed Baudelaire’s mental collapse. After this formidable spearhead of symbolism and avowed moral purpose, the novel presents, with only faint satire, a cross-section of contemporary female variance. Interestingly enough, it claims that the vice had become general in Parisian society only within the previous decade, but it does not attempt to account for that sudden burgeoning. Tammuz, an impoverished nobleman enabled by a windfall to spend a year studying life and love in Paris, is first introduced to the Orchids. This group is no more than a salon, its hostess a woman architect nearing forty. Her circle comprises a dozen idle young women, some married, ranging from a wide-eyed orphan of seventeen who has been “taken” in her lonely innocence by the first man who showed her any attention, to a beauty who worships her own dazzling skin far too much to risk its damage by male caresses. The presiding spirit, Aril, is sufficiently the diplomat to make each of her protégées feel valued and to avoid tension by playing no favorites. Tammuz is unable to discern much real passion among the group for either Aril or one another, and no lesbian activity save as outsiders stimulate it. A seductive actress-courtesan may strike a momentary spark, or curious provincial women in Paris for a brief fling may provoke some of the girls to exhibitionistic petting, but all soon lapse again into emotional indolence. Their common need is mainly companionship and freedom from the male aggression from which all have suffered in one fashion or another. Aril’s need is scope for her powers of domination.