Before joining the army she worked for a time as bookkeeper to a wealthy merchant in Lima, in whose house she also boarded, and she was dismissed in less than a year for “sporting and frolicking” with his wife’s two unmarried sisters, “one especially whom I preferred.” One day while she was “in the parlour, combing my hair, lolling my head in her lap and tickling her ankles,” the employer observed the play “through a grating” and sent her packing.[16] The inferred activities are fairly unmistakable, but since she was believed to be a man, we can deduce nothing from the incident about local attitudes towards homosexuality. A well-documented passage in the “Relaciones” tells us that after her return from Europe she was entrusted, by a couple in Vera Cruz who knew her to be a woman, with the responsibility of escorting their daughter to Mexico where the girl was to be married. Thus it is clear that her earlier emotional adventures had been well concealed. But during the journey “she became jealously attached to her charge, resented her young friend’s subsequent marriage, and in a letter of incomparable arrogance challenged the girl’s husband to a duel” because he forbade her the house. Friends managed to prevent the meeting, and it was after this that she “sheathed her rapier and set about earning an unromantic living as a carrier.” She must have been in her late forties at the time of this episode. Neo-Classical Aridity Because so little variant material appears in reputable imaginative writing between 1650 and 1800 we must turn elsewhere for evidence that variance nevertheless flourished. For reasons mentioned earlier, biography and memoirs are not generally within our scope, but in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries the chief aim of such writing was narrative interest, and certainly Brantôme, Casanova and the rest are read and enjoyed now in somewhat the same way as is Proust’s autobiographical fiction of the present century. As has been said, even historians grant that a very fair general impression of the writers’ periods can be gained from these spontaneous records.