When Julie is about to leave for college, Martha suffers complete collapse, one symptom of her illness being that, though starving, she cannot touch food. A new physician, in the act of taking her pulse as Julie enters the room, at once prescribes Julie as nurse. During the period of sickroom intimacy the two fall into each others’ arms and have some weeks “as happy as a honeymoon,” though O’Higgins is careful to repeat that the rapture is essentially that of mother and daughter. If the sensations described above are offered as maternal, one can only say that the author was convinced of an incestuous element in all parent-child relationships. One rather remarkable aspect of the whole is that though patently psychiatric, the book does not express that condemnation of the emotions described which was common to later disciples of Freud. Indeed, a physician encourages the intimacy of Julie and Martha, as did Violet Ashwin’s father in _Lady of Leisure_, though, of course, without advocating lesbian activity. In the situation as presented by O’Higgins, however, some physical release would have been inevitable. In the same year there appeared in England a much subtler treatment of variance in Radclyffe Hall’s early novel _The Unlit Lamp_. Unlike her better known _Well of Loneliness_, this narrative relegates love between women to secondary importance, its focus being the forced martyrdom of unmarried daughters in the name of filial duty. Joan Ogden is the one competent and unselfish member of a neurotic family bent on maintaining social position in their country village. Elizabeth Rodney, a dozen years older, has won a degree from Cambridge before coming, under pressure, to keep house for a bachelor brother in the same community. Her one interest is tutoring Joan, whom she hopes to see achieve a college education and some sort of life beyond small-town domesticity. Mrs. Ogden believes herself bent upon a successful marriage for her daughter, but her actual purpose is to hold her beloved child at any cost; her chief weapon is hypochondria. Joan wants to become a doctor, and Elizabeth offers to provide joint living quarters in Cambridge and to help finance the medical course, but the two girls’ long struggle ends with the mother victorious. Elizabeth, unable to endure repeated frustration, leaves the town, eventually marries, and settles in South Africa, refusing to return or to communicate with Joan.