The only person who had escaped unhurt was V.V. But she was unhurt because long ago she had been so maimed, her soul had been so warped and stunted by the influence she could still recall though she was too vitiated to resent it, that nothing now would make very much difference. V.V. had gone her own way and Gillian could not follow her. She had taken the first steps on the road down which V.V. was disappearing, and had come back to the place where it started. And now that road was closed.[53] However marred it is by such expository passages and by its sudden melodramatic suicide, the story carries more conviction than _Regiment of Women_ through coming to grips with the physical issue and through its more sympathetic presentation of the lesbian woman. * * * * * In 1926, drama for the first time took precedence over fiction, of which the year’s sole example was the translation of Louis Couperus’s _The Comedians_. This historical novel laid in the reign of Domitian includes a pair of lesbians, the emperor’s cousin and his wife’s niece, who frequent the inns of Rome disguised respectively as gladiator and street wench. Life at court is such a nightmare of intrigue and surveillance that only their mutual passion and their secret adventures make existence tolerable. The “gladiator” is shortly killed in a street brawl, and the other girl, though her interests have seemed bisexual, fades into melancholia. As to the theatre, the international success of Bourdet’s _La Prisonnière_ has already been cited. Its New York run as _The Captive_ began in September, and its drawing power very likely led to the presentation of two related plays later in the season. Thomas Hurlbut’s lesbian _Hymn to Venus_ opened in Atlantic City in late November and was scheduled for further trial in Chicago before appearing on Broadway. Its initial performance rated a single brief review in the _New York Times_,[54] chilly and vague, saying of the play only that its theme was that of _The Captive_ and that it ended with a suicide. There was no indication whether the treatment was sympathetic or otherwise, and the text of the play has not been available. It was withdrawn after a second performance and reached neither Chicago nor New York.