Since she has never been in love with Anna, and the latter throughout much of the story believes her to be a man, the variant issue is as confused as always in a romance of sex disguise. Like Gunter’s farce, however, the tale bears witness to interest in intersexual types even among superficial American readers, for Rosamunda has no feminine characteristics. It also indicates the author’s belief that such types result from environment rather than heredity. Rosamunda, despite her Spanish coloring, is revealed at the end as Anna’s sister (stolen from Holland in infancy), and not related at all to the Spaniards upon whom she has modeled herself. The blood kinship between the two girls, moreover, is evidently meant to account for Anna’s spontaneous attraction, which after the revelation of Rosamunda’s sex becomes a profound sisterly devotion. Readers were thus provided with a spicy morsel but spared the slightest moral indigestion. (If this account makes the tale seem one of mere sex disguise, comparison with Compton Mackenzie’s _Sylvia Scarlett_ of a few decades later will make the difference apparent.) The first of the century’s openly published titles by a major writer was John Masefield’s _Multitude and Solitude_ (1909), its author’s least-esteemed novel to judge from the neglect accorded it by literary historians, libraries, and secondhand catalogs. It is true that from the standpoint of artistry it falls into two almost unrelated halves; but it is, nevertheless, a convincing study of a young dramatist in search of his soul—that is, of the “high and austere” character he feels essential to a great artist. He does achieve his end via some gruelling years with a medical unit in South Africa, but he is driven to this heroic measure by a series of major and minor frustrations reminiscent of the tricks of Fate in Thomas Hardy’s work. Among the major tragedies is the death of the woman he has long loved, and this calamity is the end of a chain of trivial mischances in which the detonating factor is jealousy on the part of his beloved’s woman friend. There is an artistic preliminary sounding of the variant note early in the book when, depressed at failing to find Ottalie in her London apartment, he stops at a café where he sees a red-haired fierce little poet who sat close by reading and eating cake. The yellow back of _Les Fleurs du Mal_ was propped against his teapot. Something of the fierceness and passion of the Femmes Damnées ... was wreaked upon the cake.[21] After Ottalie is drowned while crossing to Ireland, her friend Agatha tells the lover what he had already guessed: Ottalie’s visit to her Irish relatives was partially the result of his not having definitely proposed marriage. And his failure to do so was (again in part) due to Agatha’s jealously interrupting a tête-à-tête between the lovers, and later delaying a letter from Ottalie to him. Agatha confesses all this during her prostration after her friend’s death.