That the whole business is rather a pose is apparent in the women’s adoption of picturesque nicknames—not masculine—and is further attested to by the confession of a senior member. While protesting her own and the group’s willingness to die for Aril, she makes clear to the young man that all of them are more thrilled by his masculine interest than by anything happening among themselves. Tammuz’s next field for study is the Royal Maupins, a fencing club housed and headed by a deserter from the Orchids too masculine to submit to Aril’s dominance. Whereas the Orchids were all passive-feminine, even though one or two were tall, small-breasted and narrow-hipped, the Maupins consciously affect masculinity, in their nicknames, and in wearing fencing hose and men’s silk shirts exclusively in the privacy of their quarters. Here the prime favorite is not the hostess and nominal leader but “the Chevalier,” a woman who has avoided overt expression of all emotion, variant or normal, and whose “purity” Orchids and Maupins alike hold in such reverence that they forbear trying to win her from it. She shows an immediate predilection for the young man whose self-mastery in the pursuit of an ideal equals her own, and this semi-defection from the lesbian cause wakes violent jealousy among the pettier Maupins. A trio of them provokes Tammuz to a match with their most skilled fencer, fitting his opponent with a plastron beneath her tunic and substituting untipped blades for regulation foils. Their apparent plot is to kill him in the guise of accident. But the young man divines the trick, makes the sign of the cross with his blade, and contrives to break off the tip of it in his opponent’s concealed guard, escaping with a superficial wound. The exposure of the trick results in the expulsion of the offending trio and in the Chevalier’s betrayal of an overmastering love for him. Although he feels an equal attraction, he goes his way. He diagnoses the Maupins as poseurs whose prototype is the swashbuckling male adolescent, still encumbered by feminine weaknesses while lacking the male virtues of intelligence and impersonality. His further “studies” in Paris lead him to a bathing club where the sexual play of “socialites” is indistinguishable from that of courtesans, and to the dressing rooms and studios of actresses and artists where similar behavior is even more brazenly manifested. Along the way he accumulates male gossip in the best clubs and sensational stories from the yellow journals, all of which he holds heavily responsible for nurturing the legend and cult of Lesbos.