The single protesting voice in American poetry is that of George Stirling, whose _Strange Waters_ is a brief narrative related to the work of Robinson Jeffers in both its Pacific coast setting and in grimness of theme. To a childless, but quite happy, poet and his Irish wife are sent the latter’s eighteen-year-old twin nieces. They are the children of her much older brother, to whom she has alluded only once during her married life proclaiming him a monster. His deathbed letter implies some ironic justice in their being left to her. They are fiery-haired beauties, abnormally reticent except with one another, and their mutual devotion is marked. The more boyish twin exhibits a brilliant intellect which fascinates the poet, but he intuitively senses something amiss, and listens at the door of the bedroom where they sleep together. To his horror he hears evidence of active lesbianism, and in the morning he accuses them openly. Refusing to answer him, the two set out for their usual day-long roaming on cliffs and shore. However, they do not return. When their bodies are washed in from the Pacific, one proves to be a boy. The subtle implication is that they are the incestuous offspring of the poet’s wife and her brother. Their relation, then, is not variant, but it gives Stirling opportunity to pass upon lesbianism a judgment quite as black as upon incest, for which in this case a hereditary etiology is implied. * * * * * From England the variant contribution is even thinner and more evasive than from America. Richard Aldington’s _Loves of Myrrhine and Konallis_ (1926) is yet another derivative from Louÿs’s _Songs of Bilitis_. Its pair are the young goat-girl, Konallis, and the prosperous courtesan, Myrrhine, who bids her maid close her doors to male lovers, “for this is a sharper love.”[65] The tenuous drama progresses through white nights, bacchic revels, momentary unfaithfulness, and philosophic communing, and ends with Myrrhine’s death and Konallis’s subsequent marriage. Though graced with felicitous phrasing and vivid evocation of passionate mood, it is the weakest of the echoes from Louÿs’s original because the least direct in presentation of its theme. Victoria Sackville-West’s _King’s Daughter_ (1930) is very different but even more cryptic. Its echoes are wholly English and recall the Elizabethan lyrists from one of whom the poet is descended. The scant two-dozen pages, full of country images sharp and delicate as frost, conjure up the spirit—seldom the physical presence—of an elusive coquette and of the proud speaker, who Although the blackness of her heart torment Me and her whiteness make me turbulent,[66] will commit neither pleas nor actions to paper. One early line disclaims intimacy: “How shall I haunt her separate sleep?” The only others nearly as explicit are: Estranged from all, and rapt, I only ask To be alone when I am not with you.[67]