The same question arises in reading Thomas Hardy’s earliest novel, _Desperate Remedies_ (1871), even though some early chapters give more details of a variant episode than anything in Holmes. Circumstances force the well-born Cytherea at eighteen into service as a lady’s maid, and Miss Aldclyffe, a spinster of forty-six, employs her despite her frank admission of inexperience wholly from infatuation with her beauty and physical grace. Since both women are headstrong and mercurial, Cytherea’s term as servant lasts a matter of mere hours, but its stormy ending promotes her to the status of companion and (ultimately) partial heiress of her mistress’s fortune. This transition occurs during their single night together, in the course of which the older woman learns that the girl is already in love with a man and does her best to turn her adored against him and all of his sex. Miss Aldclyffe is a “tall ... finely built woman of spare though not angular proportions,”[14a] but her aversion to men is the result of early seduction and desertion and not innate, and her passion for Cytherea, half-maternal, stems from years of emotional starvation. The girl, though also strong-willed and independent, is wholly feminine and quite unable to satisfy her mistress’s pleas for some warmth of response to her caresses. Although _Desperate Remedies_ shows some immaturity in its Victorian elaboration of plot, its grasp of character foreshadows the mastery Hardy was later to attain, and an already developed ironic detachment saves the night incident from being either mawkish or offensive to British readers. Nothing in it betrays the least awareness of lesbian possibilities on the part of either Miss Aldclyffe or her author, nor is there any conscious feminism in her disparagement of men. Actually, she at once sets about contriving to marry Cytherea to a man of her own choice—her unacknowledged illegitimate son. The variant episode is thus brief and incidental, but it is significant in having no known antecedent in British fiction save Wollstonecraft’s _Mary_ published nearly a century earlier.[15]