Written in the same year and treating the same theme more obliquely was Victor Margueritte’s _La Garçonne_ (issued in a considerably expurgated English translation in 1923 as _The Bachelor Girl_).[23] Monique Lerbier, a true child of her decade, gives herself to her fiancé a fortnight before her wedding, not only in token of loving trust but in an effort to be more his equal in experience and courage. Then almost on the eve of the ceremony she learns that she is merely a pawn in a business deal between her father and Lucien, and also that her fiancé has not given up a mistress of long standing nor does he intend to do so. Outraged, she breaks with both him and her family, launches herself as a decorator, and after some years of struggle achieves conspicuous success. Along with her business career she leads a complicated personal life with three or four lovers, one of them a woman, and only after much travail attains emotional stability and a happy marriage. Among the omissions from the English translation are the most explicit heterosexual scenes and all homosexual passages. In the original French version the latter are of considerable importance. The first involves Monique and her chum Elizabeth, both sixteen. “Zabeth” has adored Monique for three years without daring to reveal her desires, which Monique for her part has never suspected. Then on a sweltering afternoon the girls slip off their blouses—one is reminded of Mlle Tantale—and fall to comparing breasts. Now Monique senses her friend’s excitement and responds, and only a chance interruption prevents her immediate initiation into the life of the senses. Nearly a decade later, when Monique has plunged feverishly into the bohemian life of Paris in the effort to forget Lucien, she and Zabeth (now married) participate in a fashionable opium party and at last consummate their long-deferred caresses.[24] Monique’s important lesbian affair, however, involves a music-hall star who is still bewitching at fifty, with whom she enjoys some months’ intimacy. It is this woman’s tactful and knowing advances which release her emotions from the ice in which the wreck of her engagement has frozen them. The two often dance together in public, are recognized at once as intimate by the male and female homosexuals who throng the dancing clubs, and suffer neither personally nor professionally from the association. It fades to a predictable end when Monique discovers that men no longer repel her. Both women then return to heterosexual associations.[25] * * * * *