This fantastic plan is carried through, and for three years the changeling, dressed as a girl, is Nana’s passionate adorer. In the meantime Nana has borne her husband a son who will be his heir unless the older boy is restored to his proper status. This dilemma naturally troubles the father and when in addition his wife’s charming ‘companion’ is demanded in marriage, he decides the mummery has gone far enough. But he reckons without Nana. Exerting her hypnotic powers now upon him, she moves him to shoot himself, inherits his fortune, consigns her own son to a boarding school, and sets out upon a world tour with her ‘girl companion.’ In love with the latter from the outset, she now considers releasing him from the hypnotic spell so that they can marry, but she fears a return of his former antagonism, and, in view of her own seniority, she decides to assume the man’s role herself. Always with the aid of hypnotism she achieves this end, marries her stepson, and sets up a household. Presently the desire for a child seizes the couple. Nana is for adoption but the ‘wife’ objects. And now, as Hirschfeld says, ‘comes a climax of fantasy so grotesque that the imagination conceiving it must really have been warped.’ Through her convenient powers Nana induces illusory pregnancy in the “wife,” bears the child herself, and contrives to get it into the “mother’s” arms at the correct psychological and physical moment. But now an unforeseen complication develops. The “wife” hails the son as a girl. The necessity for concealing the child’s sex from everyone throughout its childhood puts a grave strain on Nana, but her ingenuity is equal to the task, and the family enjoys an uncommonly happy life for a matter of twenty years. When illness overtakes Nana she refuses a physician, and only on her deathbed pours out the truth to her “wife.” Though the hypnotic spell is now broken, the latter’s mental “set” is so completely established that he takes the story for mere delirious babbling. The author, Hirschfeld assures us, solves the two survivors’ problem as ingeniously as he contrived it, though it is difficult to imagine how. Aside from the stepson’s years of subjective lesbianism before marriage, the novel’s most noteworthy point is its presentation of hypnotism as able to effect complete endocrine change, an exaggerated foreshadowing of modern psychosomatic theory, and quite opposed to the then-popular hereditary hypothesis.