To return once more to France, during 1896 the _Mercure de France_ carried serially Remy de Gourmont’s _Le Songe d’une Femme_, a work of higher quality than any since James’s _The Bostonians_. In the form of correspondence among some dozen persons it presents an exhaustive analysis of what constitutes a satisfactory sexual relationship. The central figures are a sensitive intellectual, Paul; a simple, sensuous, and radiantly happy Annette; and a fascinating but physically inhibited Claude whose emotional pattern closely resembles that of Mlle Tantale without being similarly accounted for. Claude is married and has also experimented sexually with an artist for whom she posed in the nude, but she has never achieved satisfaction. She exerts an irresistible charm over women but has found relations with them equally unrewarding. For a time she falls under the spell of Annette’s open-hearted warmth, but Annette scorns lesbianism as childish. Claude dreams of a perfect love which will be more than fleshly, and for a time she is hopeful of realizing her ideal with Paul. During what might be called a probationary period she holds him captive by giving him “all her thoughts,” and permitting generous caresses without complete surrender. Paul has cherished a similar dream and has found Annette too exclusively sensual. In the end, however, he abandons Claude for the simple and more “natural” woman. Claude, he finds, can bring happiness to no one, not even herself. The implication is that for anyone who seeks romantic perfection all love must end in failure—a direct echo from Baudelaire. De Gourmont’s title pronounces such an ideal typically feminine: a woman’s dream. The last important negative item before 1900 was Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw” (1898). If his delineation in 1885 of the Bostonian Olive Chancellor was moderate enough to leave critics dubious whether he intended her as a lesbian, there is nothing ambiguous in his later story. In one of his letters, James himself says that his intention was to give “the impression of ... the most infernal imaginable evil and danger.”[31] In this novelette, an innocent young governess goes to a remote English country estate to take charge of two orphans, a boy of ten and a girl of eight. The children’s precocious beauty and charm strike her at once as more than normal, and apprehension dawns with her learning that the boy has been expelled from his school for reasons carefully evaded in the letter of dismissal.