The second major German author is Frank Wedekind, who, like Balzac, presents three sharply contrasting pictures of female variance. Comparable in innocence to _Seraphitus-Seraphita_ is the devotion in _Mine-ha-ha_ (1909) of a child dancer to her ballet mistress, a woman in the late twenties, oriental in coloring, boyish of build, and military in the ruthlessness of her discipline. For sheer magic in imparting the illusion of reality to fantastic circumstances this novelette has few equals, but attention must be confined here to its variant aspects. For a half-dozen years, between seven and fourteen, Hidalla lives only for her fortnightly ballet lessons, and the intervening days pass in a maze of gruelling practice and bemused reverie. The latter, however, is not sexual. When Hidalla reaches the age—about eleven—for nightly appearance with the ballet troupe, objective self-expression partially relieves the intensity of her introverted emotion. As soon as she leaves the conventual rigors of the school for life as an élite demi-mondaine her outlook is completely altered. Although she feels no love for her wealthy male protector, she watches—at the age of perhaps sixteen—from his loge in the great municipal opera house while her former idol dances starring roles, and feels only a reminiscent warmth, as much for her own remembered obsession as for its one-time object. She skirts the edge of two other experiences which serve to define the stringent ban upon lesbian intimacies in the training school. In pre-adolescence she feels a transient tenderness for a companion, but the latter is terrified at a half-proferred kiss during a twilight stroll. Does Hidalla not know the penalty for “going with” another girl? The sour and hideous servants who do the dormitory housework are there because in their training days they “went with” girls, thereby ruining forever their chances in that mysterious but alluring world beyond the gates into which the school’s finished products are released—though neither of the children has any idea what their place in it is to be. Hidalla’s second attraction is to one of the younger children whom she sees enter the school at seven as she did, shy and bewildered, and (like Claudine) she feels for this reflection of her earlier self a maternal as well as passionate love. She is barely adolescent at the time, but the love-starved life of these orphans whose existence is bounded by the Spartan walls of the school makes some such overflow of the heart inevitable. The small hours of a night that she spends crouched at the foot of the little girl’s bed, struggling with the hunger to go closer, restrained only by the knowledge that to do so may mean the child’s ruin, make a scene of delicate intensity equalling any in literature.