Clare’s reaction is not prepared for in advance. Moreover, this episode is so placed and treated as to make it the supreme climax of the plot, and the implication is clear: it is the sex starvation of spinsterhood which produces variance, a barren substitute for married love. If the spinster is brilliant and proud, a sadistic egotism constantly requiring fresh victims will be a concomitant. Clare’s spinsterhood is involuntary; she is, then, a potentially tragic figure, and the novel would have gained in power had she been so presented throughout. But she is shown only as momentarily pathetic, and after such moments her recoveries are too ready and her retaliations too mean to permit of sustained sympathy. One is left with a sense that the author had known a Clare Hartill all too well, had emerged hating her, and had not yet achieved the detachment necessary for producing artistic unity. Later in 1917 _I, Mary MacLane_ provided an autobiographical sequel to the author’s volumes of fifteen years earlier. Like her first book, it is an impressionistic journal of the preceding year which includes considerable retrospective information. Once more Mary is in Butte, convalescing from a grave illness induced by a half-dozen hectic years in Boston and New York. She still hates men, who have never stirred any emotion in her, and with whom in their “crude sex-rapacity” she has been careless as no “regular woman” would dare to be. One gathers, then, that the heartbreak from which she has suffered for a year is not the work of a man. It is one thing I do not dwell upon in this book of Me. Much of Me had nothing to do with my heart when it broke: though I loved with all of Me ... one who lives in New York—and I lost and lost, all the way. There was mere human ordinariness, about which I built up a strangely sincere temple of grace which I looked to see shed light on my life like the eternal beauty of a Daybreak. I gave the best I knew to it, from a distance, and I lost.... All was broken without so much as a clasp of hands.[34] That Mary is now well aware of all potentialities between women is clear from other comments; for example, that she “wasted” several years in the two eastern cities on friendships (with women) from whose ill effects she will never recover, having given too much of herself in the “headlong newness of knowing and owning friendship after long young loneliness.”[35] Elsewhere, she mentions translating Sappho, and says: I am some way the Lesbian woman, ... [but] there is no vice in my Lesbian vein, ... [though] I have lightly kissed and been kissed by Lesbian lips. I am too personally fastidious, too temperamentally dishonest ... to walk in direct repellent roads of vice even in freest moods.[36]