that is, definitely a masculine personality; but actually she is no more than “a brave bluff.” Sophie is a New Englander with “the angular body of a spinster but ... a face that would have belonged to the decadent days of Italian greatness,” and with “the unobtrusive good manners of a gentleman.” Events prove her, however, to be both feminine and feline. Adele has “the freedom of movement and the simple instinct for comfort that suggests a land of laziness and sunshine.” Very early in the narrative she exclaims, “I always did thank God I wasn’t born a woman,”[15]—this surprising statement is neither then nor later elaborated in any way—but everything about her save her intellect is passive to the point of inertia, and she struggles against being drawn into the “turgid and complex world” of passionate intimacy. She finds it impossible, however, to remain indifferent to Helen’s subtle courtship, which includes “fluttering” caresses as the three lie on the deck under the stars. Her familiarity with attraction between women is evident from some early self-searching: As for me is it another little indulgence of my superficial emotions or is there any possibility of my really learning to realize stronger feelings. If it’s the first I will call a halt promptly.[16] At one point Helen charges her with “middle-class morality,” to which Adele retorts: I simply contend that the middle class ideal which demands that people be affectionate, respectable, honest and content, that they avoid excitements and cultivate serenity is the ideal that appeals to me, it is in short the ideal of affectionate family life.[17] But that (says Helen) means cutting passion quite out of your scheme of things. Adele replies: Not simple moral passions, they are distinctly of it but really my chief point is a protest against this tendency ... to go in for things simply for the sake of experience.... [That] is to me both trivial and immoral. As for passion, it has no reality for me except as two varieties, affectionate comradeship ... and physical passion in greater or less complexity ... and against the cultivation of the latter I have an almost puritanic horror and that includes an objection to it in any of its many disguised forms.[18] In accordance with these principles Adele spends her summer in Spain, happy in the mere “family” comradeship of a cousin. But during the subsequent winter she plays a divided game. She cannot resist going repeatedly from Baltimore to New York to see Helen, though once there she is not only passive but resistant to the other girl’s wooing. She even says explicitly that they have few interests in common, but still it is she who does all the traveling to make their growing intimacy possible, for Helen’s resources are sharply curtailed by unsympathetic parents.