A more oblique and much more artistic species of defense is incorporated in Arnold Bennett’s _The Pretty Lady_ (1918), of which the main theme is the relation between a wealthy London bachelor and a Parisian courtesan war-bound in London. Despite the outcry the book raised among reviewers, the sexual aspects of this affair are subordinated to the soothing effect of the French woman’s simple and cosy subjective complaisance, in contrast to the hectic wartime mood of the Englishwomen with whom Hoape is thrown together. One of these, Concepçion Smith, is the daughter of a British financial magnate who operated in Lima, and it is not wholly clear whether her mother or merely her given name and her upbringing were Latin-American. Orphaned at eighteen, she returned to London and kept house for her bachelor uncle, a cabinet minister, earning a reputation as hostess and wit. Having married for love, and lost her husband within the first few weeks of World War I, she leaves for Glasgow early in the story to dull her sorrow through canteen work in a munitions plant. She is described as having a masculine mentality, being relatively indifferent to feminine graces, and lacking somewhat in obvious sex appeal. She is at this time about thirty. Her closest friend has been Lady Queenie Lechford, perhaps a decade younger, a spoiled only child, capricious, flippant, the type of hectic and brittle “flapper” who was to become so common a figure in the fiction of the 1920s. That the two quarrelled bitterly over Concepçion’s leaving London one learns only when they are reunited late in 1916, after Concepçion has broken under the strain of overwork and the shock of a horrifying accident to a factory girl. The two women’s reunion is delineated with the subtlest indirect touches, but it is clearly passionate. Of the two, Concepçion seems the more deeply involved. Though there are hints that she herself is not uninterested in Hoape, she tells him Queenie is in love with him and urges him to marry the girl in spite of the considerable difference in their ages. She would do anything in the world, she declares, to win even a few weeks’ happiness for her young friend. Even while Hoape is evading her suggestion, Lady Queenie, given to reckless watching of air-raids from the roof of her parents’ town house, is killed by falling anti-aircraft shrapnel. Concepçion, with nothing now to live for, plans suicide, but is dissuaded by Hoape’s concern for her, and one foresees that these two will eventually marry. Bennett thus appears to diagnose variant (possibly lesbian) connections as one phase of wartime hysteria, induced mainly by the shortage of eligible men. Though there is a shade of satire in his picture, there is certainly no disapproval.