Olive is increasingly obsessed by her love for Verena. Of Verena, James says: “Her share in the union, ... was no longer passive, purely appreciative; it was passionate too, and it put forth a beautiful energy.”[18] At last Verena is ready for public appearance, and invites Basil to her first lecture, since he has been forbidden his cousin’s house in Boston. He takes the opportunity to talk long and seriously to her about herself, Olive’s influence, and his own love for her. He tells her that what the times need is not more feminization but less, that “it’s a ... hysterical, chattering ... age of false delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities.... The masculine character, the ability to dare and endure, to know and yet not fear reality ... is what I want to preserve.”[19] He tells her, too, that she has allowed Olive to imprison her in “a false thin shell” of devotion to feminism, when actually she has a genius for giving herself, not to a cause, but to normal life with a man. The girl is so moved that she dares not see him again and cannot hide her disturbance from Olive. The story then records a rapidly accelerating struggle between the man and the older woman for possession of the girl. The climax comes on the night of Verena’s great Boston debut, when, just before speaking before an audience of thousands, she falls ill in the dressing room from inner emotional conflict. Basil attempts to reach her; Olive, beside herself, tries to keep him out; but Verena is aware of his presence and of her own accord chooses him in preference to public triumph and a potentially brilliant career. As to the precise nature of the relationship between the two women, no more is specified than a good deal of quiet kissing and holding of hands, more symbolic than passionate except for a general “tremulousness.” At one point the following appears: “It was a very peculiar thing, their friendship: it had elements which made it probably as complete as any (between women) that had ever existed.”[20] This is included as part of a mental soliloquy of Verena’s, and so Rahv, who comments on the “prescience with which [James] analyzed ... the lesbian woman,” may possibly be justified in adding that “one cannot be sure that James understood her precisely as such.”[21] Had Verena’s rumination above been presented as James’s own, there could be no doubt of its significance, for he had spent a year in Paris during the 1870’s, had known Flaubert, Maupassant and Zola, and could not have escaped awareness of all emotional potentialities between women. It is interesting that he was careful not to speak in the role of author, nor to venture recording any comparable fragment of the strongly variant Olive’s stream of consciousness.