It is only when World War I breaks out and Vermont is invaded by German troops that La Bonifas comes into her own. Then the disorganized community, abandoned by its craven officials, turns to the emerging recluse whose administrative ability, dauntless courage, and considerable cunning save it from complete ruin. Thereafter, Marie enjoys a position of honor. Her older enemies have died or fled, her younger persecutors have been drawn off into the army. Indeed, old enough by then to be the mother of the younger troops, and having won their respect, she feels only warm admiration for their strength. “Marie Bonifas had made her peace with men.” She is not, however, essentially altered even by this change in one of her basic attitudes. Her interest still centers about young girls and women. A daughter of her one-time “shepherdess” is now her own goddaughter, and Marie frequently visits her old school at the edge of town. The final scene in her drama occurs at a prize-giving fête at that institution when Marie, occupying a seat of honor, watches a dance-pageant presented by the students. At the sight of all this young beauty costumed with the freedom of the Twenties, and at the sound of a girl soloist rendering with fervor the lament from Gluck’s _Orpheus_, the famous woman dissolves in a passion of tears. It is the final irony of her life that one sympathetic observer should whisper to another that she must be thinking of a dead lover. Exclusively variant women are rare in French fiction, and this long and careful study of one is easily the best of its sort the country has produced. Lacretelle has neither romanticized his heroine nor taken sides in the heredity-environment dispute. Both innate masculine traits and early conditioning start Marie on her variant way, and her later social persecution is due equally to her own temperament and to the town’s spiteful prejudice. This same temperament saves her from succumbing intellectually to feminism or to the specious medical lore on variance which she reads. She finds outlet for its strength only as the war provides her with a man’s job to do. As far as simple realism and dispassionate tolerance are concerned, _La Bonifas_ has scarcely been bettered in any language.