Beneath this drama of parental tyranny runs a strong current of variant emotion. Mrs. Ogden is fragile, jealous, hysterical and over-demonstrative. Both younger women are unfeminine in appearance, cool and fearless in temperament, both affect a masculine simplicity in dress, and Joan crops her hair decades before fashion sanctions that mode. Elizabeth has a masculine distaste for easy caresses and meticulously conceals the depth of her feeling, so that Joan’s shy reciprocal emotion never finds outlet (the “unlit lamp” is the passion Elizabeth refuses to set alight). The basic situation, then, is a variant triangle in which the clinging and helpless mother wins against a rival who will employ none of the tactics of seduction, and the result is the virtual ruin of both girls’ lives. There are intimations here of what was to become open championship of lesbian love four years later in _Well of Loneliness_. But they are only implicit. Also in 1924 Arnold Bennett contributed a short draught of his cool common sense in _Elsie and the Child_. With customary realism and irony he presents a London physician’s household centered about Miss Eva, aged twelve, an only child. The doctor, busy day and night earning every advantage for his daughter, sees little of her. His wife is a domestic perfectionist and strict disciplinarian. The emotional center of the child’s life is Elsie, the wholesome but rather dull servant who was hired originally because Eva (like Metta in _The Scorpion_) took an instant fancy to her. Elsie is all heart, quick only in her intuitions, humbly devoted to the aristocratic young mistress whose care falls largely upon her. A crisis is precipitated when the parents, aware of their daughter’s too-great dependence upon Elsie, attempt to send the girl to boarding school. She is acquainted with the headmistress, a hearty tweedy friend of her mother’s, quite the type to captivate some schoolgirls, but not Eva. Having shot up like a weed to Elsie’s considerable stature, the child is all nerves, and when crossed by her mother she breaks out with the hysterical declaration that it is not her parents but Elsie whom she loves and from whom she will not be parted.