Thus far, the third girl, Sophie, has remained surprisingly passive in view of her long-established intimacy with Helen, but in the course of this winter she enlightens Adele as to the precise nature of that intimacy. Adele is so shocked that it is implied clearly that the relation is physical and, up until then, wholly outside her own acquaintance. Not even this revelation, however, can detach her from Helen, although she deliberately elects a second summer abroad alone and suffers when Helen’s letters are stopped by a visit from Sophie. During the subsequent winter her own relations with Helen reach the stage of physical expression, but the change is not a happy one. Their pulses were differently timed. She could not go so fast and Helen’s exhausted nerves could no longer wait. Adele found herself constantly forced on by Helen’s pain. It was a false position ... her attitude was misunderstood and Helen interpreted her slowness as deficiency ... and the greater her affection for Helen became the more irritable became her discontent.[19] This is trite enough to readers of modern sexual psychology as set forth in marriage manuals. It was not trite coming from an unmarried American girl in 1903. At this juncture Sophie invites Helen to accompany her on another European trip. (As Mr. Wilson drily remarks, for the more prosperous American college graduate, Europe was then an imperative.) Helen accepts, and although Adele is certain that Sophie is financing the trip she dares not put the question directly. Or perhaps she does not want to, for Helen has urged her to spend the summer abroad also, not with them, but within easy reach. And so the lover of serenity travels for her third summer as a kind of semi-detached appendage to the other pair, and the remainder of the action is almost as tedious and confusing to the reader as to Adele herself. Because of the physical incompatibility so well described above, Helen has now cooled considerably in that respect, but her emotional dependence upon Adele increases with Sophie’s balking of private communication between them—one more testimonial to the soundness of “Proust’s law”: the inverse proportion between “love” and accessibility. Because Adele, on the other hand, is now rather more than less physically attracted, her health and peace of mind suffer noticeably during her frustrating periods with the other two. But she is bound not only by her genuine love for Helen but by her confidence that the other girl really loves her. When she reads Helen’s final desperate letter promising that she will never again allow such a situation to develop, Adele exclaims with impatience: Hasn’t she learned yet that things do happen and she isn’t big enough to stave them off? Can’t she see things as they are and not as she would make them if she were strong enough...? I am afraid it comes very near to being a dead-lock.[20]