Because she is the most masculine of all the women he has encountered, Tammuz enjoys more intellectual companionship with her than with the others. He finds her capable of understanding his concept of woman’s proper role in the scheme of things—that of Frea, goddess of fertility. She is quite in accord with his refusal to deify Love aside from its procreative aspect, and shares his unreadiness to sacrifice an impersonal quest or even personal liberty on the altar of Romance. Informed early by one of the Maupins that many women’s inability to respond to men is due to the ugliness of modern male garb, Tammuz has assumed on occasion a more graceful costume—modified Directoire—and with the Princesse Fantôme he dresses in gray silk fencer’s hose and a jacket of violet velvet. She reciprocates by appearing at dinner in an evening gown of ivory moiré, above which her white shoulders, deeply tanned face and cropped hair create a ludicrous effect. Tammuz, however, is touched by this effort at refeminization, and before long the two are enjoying a passionate interlude against that grandest of all settings, the open sea. The inevitable sequel is La Fantôme’s holding him captive aboard the yacht in obedience to a newborn feminine hunger for permanence, and only a providential near-shipwreck frees him. Her desire is that they die in each other’s arms; his, that he be spared to pursue his mission against Lesbos, and their escape from death can be attributed only to supernatural intervention in his behalf. He now returns to Paris, and in completing his study of Lesbos he accumulates as it were the dregs of naturalistic data—lesbian sadism, gross exhibitionism, the gift to his mistress by an infatuated nobleman of his fifteen-year-old daughter, an excursion into lesbian prostitution on the part of a countess in order to earn a fortune for her beloved who is a “regular” prostitute. As his money and his time run out, Tammuz, as was foreseen, is convinced that his findings prove his initial thesis: lesbianism is not a distinct psychological entity but merely one of the sins of the flesh. Its causes are numerous—comparative frigidity, feministic rebellion, defiance of undeserved social opprobrium, cynicism about all love. And productive of, or augmenting, all these is the brutality or carelessness of men, their indifference to individual personality in their approach to women. Tammuz knows that by virtue of his sexless sympathy he could have had any one of the scores of lesbians he has studied. Believing, then, that he has achieved a far-reaching psychological victory, he risks clinching it by a ruse which, as he himself observes, ‘would make the angels of orthodoxy hide their eyes with their snowy wings.’ In short, he stages a celebration of the rites of Eros, on the grounds that the proper cure for emotional aberration is not orthodox denial of the flesh but pragmatic trial of the normal.