A year later the American Henry Kitchell Webster touched briefly but scathingly on the subject of variance in _The Great Adventure_ (1916). In this history of a marriage the girl who has looked forward to motherhood is frustrated by the birth of twins, the implication being that she desired merely an object upon which to project her own personality, and the self-abnegation demanded by two young entities, boy and girl, is beyond her. Accordingly while the children can still be cared for by nurses, Rose leaves her home and seeks self-realization on the stage. In the course of her first year she takes an artist’s interest in a beautiful but inferior colleague in the chorus of a revue, whom she coaches in diction and for whom, among others, she designs flattering costumes. But when her Galatea becomes infatuated with her she is disgusted. Rose understood this better than Olga did, having had to evade one or two “crushes” while at the University. It was a sort of thing that went utterly against her instincts.[29] Olga’s efforts to persuade and caress her into intimacy are worse than futile, and in retaliation for Rose’s contempt Olga spreads gossip of an affair with the director which does Rose grave professional injury. After some further experiment, Rose returns to her family a more mature and humble woman. Olga is presented as a strongly antipathetic personality, and Rose’s quest for self-expression proves sterile and unrewarding for all concerned. Learning unselfish adjustment in marriage is “The Great Adventure.” In January 1917 the first British novel appeared which was devoted wholly to variance, and the first in English since James’s _The Bostonians_ of 1855—Clemence Dane’s _Regiment of Women_. Its attitude is as bitter as Lawrence’s in _The Rainbow_, but any question of influence is excluded by the author’s indication that it was written before the latter was published. Title and initial quotation announce the theme as “the monstrous empire of a cruel woman,” and its four-hundred-page plot revolves about a subtle sadist, outstanding mistress in a girls’ day school. Clare Hartill (the surname is surely symbolic), brilliant, sardonic, and never attractive to men, has colleagues and pupils alike well under her domination. The other mistresses stand in awe of her superior intellect, her uncanny success as a teacher, and her mordant tongue. The girls—she is really interested only in the higher secondary classes—are emotionally subjugated by her alternation of warm praise and stinging raillery, the praise intensified by “sudden brilliant smiles” and the discreet laying on of hands. Clare is a woman of feverish friendships and sudden ruptures, “unmaternal” to the core