Neither girl shows any sign of masculinity except that Paule’s voice is unusually low and penetrating. Mme. Blangy, the aggressor, is the essence of flighty femininity. But Paule shows a ripeness of figure unusual in an unmarried girl, which Adrien naïvely takes for promise of unawakened _volupté_, and both exhibit a cool and intelligent competence in dealing with practical details of their secret liaison which is overmature for their years. The cause of both girls’ abnormality is the time-worn segregation in boarding school, Mme. Blangy’s having begun earlier in her life than Paule’s. Heterosexual frigidity as a direct result, however, makes its pioneer literary appearance in this novel. To the majority of variant women thus far encountered, heterosexual experience was also attributed, and of the handful to which it was not, only five—Mary Frith, Wollstonecraft’s Mary, Lesbia Brandon, and one each in the poems of Baudelaire and Verlaine—have expressed antipathy to the male. Even in these cases revulsion was presented as a part of what Ellis calls the “homosexual diathesis,” not as the result of previous lesbian activity. Although the present writer has not encountered earlier scientific authority for Belot’s claim, his was not a mind likely to originate such an idea. His attributing meningitis to sexual excess was derived from contemporary medical theory, and it is probable that his holding homosexuality responsible for heterosexual failure was similarly grounded. Certainly the thesis was too popular with moralists and educators of the next half century to have stemmed from the passing comment of a minor novelist. During the decade in which _Mlle Giraud_ was the outstanding variant title, Barbey d’Aurevilly, nearing the end of a long career, published _Les Diaboliques_, and in one of these short stories, “The Crimson Curtain” there is a rather boyish girl, the pink of propriety when under the eye of her guardians, but unfemininely bold and aggressive with a male boarder in their house. Since none of her hidden sophistication is attributed to homosexual experience, and as the macabre end of the tale is her death from heart failure during a night of unrestrained heterosexual activity, the only implication seems to be that women with masculine traits are also “masculine” in the intensity of their sexual endowment, an idea previously hinted in Cuisin’s _Clémentine_. The notion has reappeared more modernly in ordinary as well as variant fiction, but in the 1870’s it would have run counter to growing scientific opinion that male secondary characteristics in women implied homosexuality.