Another novel with rather stronger variant overtones appeared in England in 1914, Ethel Sidgwick’s _A Lady of Leisure_. This pleasant social romance had for its main theme a muted echo from the Women’s Movement: the wealthy and idle girl’s need of a routine occupation. Violet Ashwin, daughter of a frivolous social belle and a Harley Street physician, is driven by a sense of utter futility to fly in the face of convention—and her mother’s prejudices—and apprentice herself to a modiste. Her co-worker, Alice Eccles, is an enterprising cockney who supports a neurotic mother, preferring this burden to marriage with a suitor whom she suspects of engaging in illegal enterprises. Alice is tall, handsome, high-spirited, and infinitely more self-reliant than the sheltered upper-class girl, whom at first she assists and patronizes with a kind of affectionate raillery. Soon, however, the two are close personal friends, to the horror of Violet’s snobbish mother. Between Violet and her father, though, a close alliance has always existed, and he applauds both her job and her new friendship, seeing at once the solid quality beneath Alice’s unpolished surface. When Violet works herself into a collapse and is sent to the country for the summer, Alice longed to have news of her—but she was not going to ask for it.... Her adoration for Violet, violently repressed, since its torrential force made her almost ashamed, was a thing unique, unheard of, as Miss Eccles believed, in the world before. The revelation of woman to woman is often just as remarkable, for all the truisms on the subject, as the revelation of woman to man.[24] Somewhat later, Mrs. Eccles’ mental condition having become a danger to her daughter, Dr. Ashwin copes with the mother and engages Alice as lady’s maid to his wife, hoping that her companionship may restore his still convalescent daughter’s interest in living. When he tells Violet that Alice is in the house she colors visibly and runs upstairs, “her face still pink and her heart thumping.” Alice dropped her hands and coloured gloriously, far more gloriously than Violet at her best could have accomplished. Her work slipped from her knees and she spread her splendid arms.... [Violet] went straight to her and fell upon her breast.[25] The only further detail mentioned is Alice’s kissing the other girl’s hands. The friendship survives Alice’s marriage and the birth of her first child, and she is the only person save Violet’s parents to attend the latter’s subsequent wedding. Here, then, is an unmistakably passionate relationship between adults—both girls are in their middle twenties—presented with complete sympathy and approval, and encouraged by an established physician. It is, of course, quite innocent of lesbian implications.