Elsie realizes at once that the outcome will be the dismissal of her and her husband. The latter, a victim of shell shock in World War I, is a bemused introvert given to dangerous fits of temper. It is he who turns upon Eva with the charge that her feeling for his wife is not love, since she does not care if her stubborn whim brings ruin on Elsie and himself. Made aware for the first time of the problems of others, the girl gives in and goes off to school. Bennett contrives with great skill to imply strong emotional undercurrents in Eva’s childish demands for personal service and caresses, and in Elsie’s doting ministrations. He also makes clear that the husband’s violence is actually aroused not by fear of losing his place but by jealousy, though none of the three persons involved are aware of this. Concerning as it does a girl of twelve, this story might not be classed as variant by psychologists, but one cannot help feeling that Bennett contributed it to the rapidly swelling count of variant fiction as testimony to his own stand in the matter. Despite Eva’s unusual height and her susceptibility to Elsie’s spontaneous warmth, she is not conceived as a prospective homosexual. Stimulated one summer night by watching a sophisticated garden party from her window, she slips down to the servants’ quarters to practice a nascent coquetry on Joe as well as Elsie. There could hardly be a clearer statement of Bennett’s opinion that variant emotion is as natural to puberty as growing pains, particularly where maternal affection is wanting, but that its natural span runs out with early adolescence. In 1925 four novels dealing with variance reached the English reading public—the translation of Rolland’s _Annette and Sylvie_ and Virginia Woolf’s _Mrs. Dalloway_, both treating it briefly and with sympathy, Sherwood Anderson’s _Dark Laughter_, touching upon it even more casually and with disfavor, and Naomi Royde-Smith’s _Tortoiseshell Cat_, devoted wholly to the theme and wholly condemnatory. Rolland’s lesbian interlude between the half-sisters Rivière has already been described. Anderson’s heroine, a married woman on the verge of taking a lover, recalls privately her first trip abroad under the guidance of a couple whose sophistication she did not suspect until on shipboard. The woman had made skillfully veiled lesbian advances which she recognized for what they were and resisted with equal skill. Anderson clearly condemns this deliberate attempt at seduction, but no more severely than he condemns the woman’s ruses to snare wealthy subjects for her portrait-painting husband. The episode is slighter than the one in _Poor White_ and of little weight in its chief actor’s life.