That variant emotion was at least an intermittent preoccupation with Millay until she was thirty is evident from examination of her total work before 1923, the year of her marriage. There are a number of sonnets and other verses in which the sex of the subject is uncertain, if not deliberately concealed, but which do not have the tone of those specifically written to men. Then there is her poetic drama, _The Lamp and The Bell_, written during a sojourn in Paris soon after graduation from Vassar, and presented at the college in 1921. Its theme is an undying devotion between two young women, and Elizabeth Atkins’s description of it is so delightful that it must be borrowed: The kingdom of Fiori is Poughkeepsie-on-the-Hudson, and college students and faculty keep looking straight through their Italian veils, very much as Elizabethan Londoners keep lifting their masks in Shakespeare’s Illyria and Verona and Messina. The theme is that one of burning concern in any girls’ school—the theme of friendship; and the play takes up their endless arguments as to whether it will last. Octavia, the very mildly wicked stepmother in the play, supposedly a queen but essentially a dean of women, avers that the friendship of the princess and her own daughter is not healthy and will not last. Of course the girls prove her wrong. The princess, without a murmur, gives up her lover to her friend; and long afterwards she consents to violation by her most loathed enemy, in order to be permitted to reach her friend as she lies dying. The theme is surely Elizabethan. From Lyly to Beaumont and Fletcher, Elizabethan literature is filled with asseverations that friendship is a stronger thing than sexual love.... The only novelty is that this twentieth century play deals with the friendship of women instead of men....[56] Friendship, however, is much too cool a description for the love between the princesses. The relation is passionate, though as always in her variant verse Millay avoids any implication of physical intimacy.