As for Lurida Vincent in _A Mortal Antipathy_, despite Dr. Oberndorf’s emphasis on her masculinity, she is physically fragile, underdeveloped, and anything but boyish. We see her only in boarding school and learn nothing of her antecedents or early history. The factors conditioning her against a feminine role are that she is plain and unappealing to men and abnormally brilliant. Her only masculinity consists in a resolute ambition to best her male acquaintances in intellectual achievement. Envious of her schoolmates’ charm and athletic prowess, she reacts by becoming the school prodigy and an ardent feminist. Jealously, and with unconscious passion, she adores Euthemia Tower, who returns her fondness with marked moderation and common sense. Euthemia is obviously more Holmes’s ideal of womanhood than a convincing individual. She is beautiful with the wholesome beauty of youth, modest, warm-hearted, and admirably well-balanced. She is also the school’s champion athlete, strong enough to carry an unconscious young man, whom she later marries, from a burning house without assistance. From these novels one gathers that the good doctor was partial to women who were physically not much inferior to men, but he firmly believed that such equality did not breed masculine emotions. His scientific acumen had made him aware of passionate attachments between women[14] (a secondary character in _The Guardian Angel_ is so devoted to her mother that the latter says, “I should think you were in love with me, my darling, if you were not my daughter”), but such attachments appear to concern him so little that one wonders if he was even aware of their ultimate potentialities.