Critics are now agreed that the tapestry of female variance which Proust wove with such art was in part a transposition of the male homosexuality he did not dare to treat so openly. Perceptive readers detected this at once. Colette in _Ces Plaisirs_ pronounced his lesbians unconvincing little monsters, and Natalie Clifford Barney in _Aventures de L’Esprit_ writes of warning him when his early volumes appeared of the difficulty of translating the experience of one sex into terms of the other.[18] Even quite naïve readers of his work in English have been sceptical of Albertine’s freedom to visit Marcel in his hotel room late at night whenever he sent the servant Françoise to fetch her, and one could cite many similar inconsistencies with any known code of etiquette for “respectable” and marriageable girls in France or elsewhere. Thus Proust’s whole lesbian canvas is in part invalidated as a social document. But still the types he portrays, their various interconnections, and most of their psychology, ring perfectly true for any group of young female sophisticates. He was certainly well acquainted with many variants of both sexes, and one need discount his feminine data very little. * * * * * In 1922 Romain Rolland, already famous for his greatest novel, _Jean Christophe_, published _Annette and Sylvie_, the first volume of his second series, _A Soul Enchanted_. As _Jean Christophe_ was the life story of a man, so the later novel presents the emotional history of a passionate woman, with her ultimate fulfillment in motherhood and devotion to a son. The first episode is an attachment between the heroine, Annette, and her illegitimate half-sister, Sylvie. The former is the daughter of a puritanic and intellectual wife, the latter of a less cultivated but more charming mistress. The progress of the girls’ intimacy after both are orphaned in their twenties is unfolded with keen insight into their contrasting natures, one serious and violent, the other self-contained and gracefully wise. Sylvie’s affection was perfectly unrestrained, laughing, gamin-like, impudent, but at bottom extremely sensible.... In Annette there dwelt a strange demon of love ... she suppressed it ... for she was afraid of it; her instinct told her that others would not understand it....[19] The two are drawn to one another with an intensity which Annette does not suspect as unusual. Just before its climax their love is endangered by the passing infatuation of both girls for a summer-resort Adonis, for Sylvie a mere flirtation, stimulated largely by rivalry, but for Annette a dangerous flare of passion alight for the first time in her twenty-five years. Up to this point the girls’ devotion has expressed itself only in constant companionship, endless confidences, and free but innocent caresses. In Annette’s town house they have occupied adjoining rooms. Occasionally Sylvie, a light sleeper,