These novels of Firbank’s, shot through with allusions to both male and female homosexuality, remind one that two-thirds of the volumes of Proust’s _Recherche du Temps Perdu_ had been published in France by 1923, and were, of course, known to many English and American writers before being translated. It is easy to overrate the influence of Proust, especially as both James Joyce and Dorothy Richardson had anticipated him in “stream of consciousness” technique, the one with _Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_ (1915), the other with _Pointed Roofs_ (1917). But in no one else of Proust’s quality was homosexuality so integral a part of the narrative fabric. Translations of Proust’s most significant volumes appeared in English between 1924 and 1930. It might also be noted that Margueritte’s _La Garçonne_ was translated in 1923. A second increasingly important influence was that of Freud, already discernible in _Regiment of Women_ (though a good case could be made there for Adlerian overtones also), and becoming more and more obvious in other novels of the same calibre. A striking example was Harvey O’Higgins’ “Story of Julie Cane,” which ran serially in _Harper’s Magazine_ during 1924, and was as much a dramatized psychiatric case-record as the earlier work of Dubut de LaForest in France. Its main emotional themes are a virtually incestuous devotion between the male protagonist and his mother, and the passion of a spinster school mistress for the young heroine, her ward. The author, who delivers a good many brief lectures along the way, labels this last emotion thwarted maternity, but by the time Julie has reached late adolescence he is describing Martha Perrin’s feeling for her as follows: It had come to this, that Martha put herself to sleep at night imagining that Julie was in her arms.... She kissed the undergarments that were to touch the beloved young body; and when she had made a dress she caressed it and hugged it to her breast so that it might by proxy be her arms around Julie.... When she had Julie in the sewing room to try on the clothes she had made, her hands shook, her heart suffocated, and she turned away and wept while she fumbled over some pretense of taking up a tuck in the back of the garment.... After Julie had gone she sat with her face in her hands, her cheeks burning against her cold fingers, her mouth aching, seeing still the dimples in Julie’s shoulders, kissing them in her imagination and crying weakly, starved.[48] Few passages have been so explicit since Sappho’s famous Ode, which was less extended.