Strictly speaking, Elsie Venner alone deserves the adjective “abnormal.” Her eccentricity is due to her mother’s having suffered a rattlesnake bite during late pregnancy of which she died shortly after giving birth to her child. The girl grows up unafraid of rattlers if not immune to their poison (there is no account of her being bitten), and possessing something of the reptile’s power to hypnotize a sensitive individual with her steady ophidian gaze. As a result she is shunned by her mates, and develops a solitary and arrogant personality. She is a fearless mountain climber and not infrequently spends the night on dangerous and snake-infested rocky slopes above her home. During adolescence she exhibits for a teacher in the select female academy she attends “a special fancy” so intense it frightens the woman. On the girl’s side the obsession seems more a desire to test her power than love. The reaction of the overworked and half-hysterical teacher is one of terrified revulsion until Elsie in her last illness calls upon her to act as nurse and companion. Elsie’s only feeling of normal warmth is directed toward a young male instructor to whom she virtually offers herself, but he, too, is unable to respond as she desires, and she dies as an apparent result of subduing the innate drive to overpower those she loves. Myrtle Hazard in _The Guardian Angel_ was born in the tropics and lived her early years amid a luxury not only of natural beauty but of parental love and adulation from native servants. The strength and self-assurance thus bred enable her when orphaned to survive the efforts of a couple of puritanic aunts to break her spirit. At fifteen, precociously mature in both mind and body, she crops her hair, dons boy’s clothes, and runs off to return to India where she spent the few remembered years of happy childhood. The accident which foils her plan wins her new friends, among them a young man whom she eventually marries. Although in appearance and behavior she is the most masculine of Holmes’s heroines, variance plays the least part in her history. Her “best friend,” the only person for whom she leaves any word upon running away, is merely the bosom companion natural to an adolescent, and there is no hint of passion in Myrtle’s feeling for the girl.