Publishing simultaneously with Miss Hull but more nearly in the vein of Huneker was England’s Ronald Firbank, whose delightful absurdities began to flower with _Vainglory_ in 1918. Firbank was particularly fascinated by all aspects of homosexuality, and not one of his brief novels is without some reference to it. To render these allusions delicate he cultivated a frivolous obscurity, but it was no more designed to conceal than are a dancer’s veils to hide the form beneath. Probably the most significant in our field is _The Flower Beneath the Foot_ (1923).[45] Its setting is a principality the approximate size and importance of Monaco, with a court circle madly international. Here, as always, the lesbian glimpses are oblique, but there are three of them. A visiting Queen Thleeanouhee of the Land of Dates becomes so openly enamoured of the blonde and bovine English ambassadress that the whole court fears an “incident.” A lady in waiting in love with the Prince, after her romance is shattered by his diplomatic marriage, flees to an adored Sister in the convent where she was educated, dreaming of a return to earlier delights. She is a bit chilled at being invited, as an adult now, to wield a whip. And last, two of the queen’s ladies are becalmed for a summer afternoon alone in a small sailboat. One (she reminds her colleagues of Anthony Hamilton’s Miss Hobart) is a girl of “delicate sexless silhouette, whose exotic attraction had aroused not a few heart-burnings (and even feuds) among several of the _grandes dames_ about the court.”[46] Her companion is a ripe and languishing widow. The exiled count upon whom they intended to call catches sight of their motionless craft and trains his telescope upon it. Oh poignant moments when the heart stops still! Not since the hours of his exile had the count’s been so arrested. Caught in the scarlet radiance of the afterglow the becalmed boat, for one brief and most memorable second, was his to gaze on. In certain lands with what diplomacy falls the night.... Those dimmer-and-dimmer twilights of the North were unknown in Pisuerga. There Night pursues Day as if she meant it. “Oh, why was I not _sooner_?” he murmured distractedly aloud.[47] Needless to say, no judgments are even hinted in Firbank’s tales. If his paired ladies are rather ridiculous, so are his pretty gentlemen and his mixed couples young and old, his kings and social climbers and mad old ladies. Since all life is clearly so absurd, he seems to say, what to do save sit back (with all possible grace) and titter at the spectacle? Edmund Wilson’s diagnosis of Gertrude Stein might apply also in some measure to Firbank, though he did not retreat so far into literary obscurity. Post-War Crescendo