Since the discussion of conjecturally variant women closed with a consideration of lyric poetry, the same literary thread will be traced first in the twentieth-century pattern. More than a dozen poets have celebrated love between women, three-quarters of them feminine and all but two sympathetic. The earliest were two expatriates who adopted Paris as their residence and wrote almost exclusively in French. The lesser, from a literary viewpoint, was Natalie Clifford Barney, an American with New York and Bar Harbor background who was able to live independently in Paris and to maintain her own yacht. Born in 1877, she had by the late nineties made contact with Pierre Louÿs, and she introduced to him her British-American friend, Pauline Tarn. Both young women were enthusiastic about Louÿs’s _Songs of Bilitis_, and seeing in him ‘the champion of the young girls of the future,’ they submitted manuscripts for his judgment. They found him more inclined to admire “_jeux latins et voluptés grecques_” than the “exaggerated preoccupations” of _femmes damnées_ whose sense of sin he suspected of giving an edge to their passions. He pronounced Barney’s novel, _Lettres à Une Connue_, unsuited for publication because of its outmoded poetic diction, but concerning Tarn’s verses, which he praised, he afterward wrote to Barney: ‘You must write your story and hers. It is the indispensable first chapter to your complete romance.’[6] The implication of some previous emotional connection between the two is supported by evidence in the poetry of both. Barney was a Maupin type, with ‘a fencer’s grace noticeable in an all-too-feminine Paris; moonlight-blonde hair, blue eyes with a glint of steel, made to observe and not (like most women’s) to be gazed into; white gowns and a cape of ermine’—a composite description from later articles by her fellow authors “Aurel” and Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, quoted by Barney herself in her _Aventures de l’Esprit_.[7] In the garden of her luxurious Paris residence she built a Temple of Friendship and welcomed there many of the literary personalities of the day, evidently in conscious imitation of certain esoteric groups of the eighteenth century. Though many men were admitted, it was recognized that this was an Amazonian cult dedicated primarily to women. In her Chart of the Realm of Friendship she placed Remy de Gourmont first and Renée Vivien (Pauline Tarn) second.