It was deep April, and the morn Shakespeare was born. My love and I took hands and swore Against the world, to be Poets and lovers evermore. To laugh and dream on Lethe’s shore, To sing to Charon in his boat, Heartening the timid souls afloat; Of judgment never to take heed, But to those fast-locked souls to speed Who never from Apollo fled, Who spent no hours with the dead; Continually With them to dwell, Indifferent to heaven and hell.[3] This, along with certain other poems (notably the “Third Book of Songs” in _Underneath the Bough_), leaves no possible doubt about the intensity or the variance of their mutual emotion. Not even Colette, however, could assign a masculine or a feminine role to one or the other. Sir William Rothenstein, in his preface to _Works and Days_, describes “Michael” (Katherine) as “stout, emphatic, splendid and adventurous in talk;” “Field” (Edith) as “wan and wistful, gentler in manner, but equally eminent in the quick give and take of ideas.”[4] A good photograph of the two women shows Edith’s features to be of a decidedly boyish cast and her hair short. In the memoirs the two use a wealth of nicknames, masculine, feminine or neuter, and either may refer to the other by the male pronoun. It seems as though they tried to think of themselves as a single bisexual personality, and in one place Katherine says of the Brownings: “These two poets, man and wife, wrote alone; each wrote, but did not bless and quicken one another at their work; _we are closer married_ [italics hers].”[5] They exhibit consciousness of the physical possibilities between women more frankly than any other writers except for the portrayal of fictional characters. This is particularly striking in Edith’s account of an attack of scarlet fever she suffered while they were travelling in Germany. Katherine fought an entire hospital staff in order to occupy a room with her, and Edith writes later: “I have my love close to me.... Looking across at Sim’s little bed I realize she is a goddess, hidden in her hair—Venus. Yet I cannot reach her.... I grow wilder for pleasure and madder against the ugly Mädchen”[6] (the nurse who kept her in bed). Yet when another nurse, middle-aged, becomes infatuated and annoys her with constant caresses, she says: My experiences with Nurse are painful—she is under the possession of terrible fleshly love she does not conceive as such, and as such I will not receive it. Oh, why will Anteros make one cynical by always peering over the beauty of every love—why must his fatality haunt us?[7]