being treated as a social equal by the greatest living lady opera singer.... Emboldened by her success Dora persuaded Easter to go with her into the dressing room, from which much later they emerged wearing night draperies. A queer go, this sudden intimacy, ruminated the young man.[43] [A _queer go_ is a bit of _double entendre_ worthy of Spanish comedy.] Finally, there is a party in Easter’s quarters including a handful of lesbians, one or two smoking cigars, and Allie Wentworth, whose jealous rage is so childish that she must be publicly reproved. With this Zolaesque portrait of a lesbian woman who is unscrupulous, ruthless, and promiscuous, there is no need for Huneker to articulate his opinion of variance. Few contrasts could be sharper than that between the continental sophistication of Huneker and the midwestern simplicity of Helen R. Hull. As early as 1918 she had published in _Century Magazine_ a short-story (“The Fire”) of a small-town girl’s love for the middle-aged spinster who gives her not only art lessons but her first contact with a mellow and cultured personality—a benign reverse of the destructive relationship in _Regiment of Women_. The innocent friendship is broken off by the girl’s jealous mother on the grounds that “it’s not healthy or natural for a girl to be hanging around an old maid.” Miss Hull’s _Quest_ (1922) records the effect upon a growing girl of constant tension between her parents. As precocious as Miss Dane’s Louise, Jean falls in love at twelve with a high-school teacher, and simultaneously forms a feverish alliance with a classmate considerably older and less naïve who adores the same woman. Because the other girl is so much more accessible than the teacher, it is the former who draws the mother’s fire here, and she terminates the connection with a touch of melodrama which leaves her daughter wary of variant emotion, in the same way that the family situation has affected her with regard to heterosexual love. Jean’s subsequent relations with men are inhibited, and her two or three very warm friendships with girls and women during college and her early years of teaching never approach the intensity of her first love. In _Labyrinth_ (1923) Miss Hull attacked from a feminine angle the problem posed in _The Great Adventure_: the frustration of a versatile woman cut off from personal and intellectual contacts by housework and the care of children. After a decade of marriage Catherine returns to a challenging position which she held during World War I, though her husband, a professor, disapproves of the venture. A series of domestic crises plus the professor’s calculated move from New York to a small midwestern campus finally thwart his wife’s efforts to escape unrelieved domesticity. No variance complicates Catherine’s problems, but through minor characters three other emotional adjustments are presented, one involving two women.