Since Miss Stein’s novelette remained unpublished for half a century, MacLane and Ellis would be America’s only representatives in this early period but for short stories which appeared sporadically. One of Josephine Dodge Dascom’s _Smith College Stories_ (1900), “A Case of Interference,” just skirted the variant field. A junior, prominent because of her literary ability, enters the despised arena of campus politics to save an unpopular gifted freshman who worships her from leaving college. A little later the _Ladies’ Home Journal_ published a slighter college story, “The Cat and the King,” by Jennette Lee, in which a freshman shams illness in order to join her senior idol in the infirmary, and is extricated from ensuing complications by a wholly sympathetic woman physician. These were both written on an adult level. The only known variant juvenile, _The Lass of the Silver Sword_ by Mary Constance Du Bois, ran in _St. Nicolas Magazine_ during 1909 and was published in book form later.[26] Centered about the adoration of a fourteen-year-old girl for a senior of nineteen in her boarding school, it was sympathetic but so circumspect as to lack full vitality. Catherine Wells’s “The Beautiful House” (_Harper’s Magazine_, 1912) pictures an idyllic relation between two adult artists, for the older and less feminine of whom the connection ends tragically with the marriage of the younger woman. Helen R. Hull’s “The Fire” (1918) will be discussed later with its author’s longer narratives. It is noteworthy that none of this early fiction records disapproval of variant experience on the part of either the authors or society. It is seen as educative and beneficial during the teens, or even in the following decade for the single woman, and it provides the only happiness during adolescence for several girls more gifted than their peers. If in Masefield’s novel its sequel is tragic, jealousy rather than variance per se is responsible, and Miss Stein condemns the experience she describes, not as lesbian, but as generally spineless and unintelligent. In the cases (Miss Stein’s and Miss Richardson’s) where antipathy or indifference to men is noted, women’s attraction to their own sex is not responsible, but is rather a concomitant product of unspecified factors. Sophistication and Dispute