In seeking to discover how she can reach Emmaline alone, she finds herself one evening spying through an open window upon a family scene centering about Emmaline’s four children. The two men, father and uncle (the latter her own husband) are fatuously devoted to them. Emmaline has become wholly maternal, plump and placid. The climax occurs when Emmaline offers the youngest, an infant of six months, her breast. Revolted to nausea, Sophie plunges away through the darkness with demonic laughter. ‘Now Emmaline was no longer worthy of her passion. Was her own life wrong? Must one be like such clods to be happy? Should she have had four children? ... No! She repudiated such spineless notions. She was what she was. She thrust from her her old dream of Emmaline’s breast, she jeered at Emmaline’s bovine happiness.’[27] This further repudiation of maternity heralds the final stage of her degeneration, a round of infamous adventures stimulated by drink and drugs. ‘Unwilling to believe there could be so little pleasure in vice, she chose to think she simply had not learned enough,’ and she frequents the most debauched Paris haunts, no longer bothering to select her partners, but seizing indifferently on servants and waitresses, to whom she becomes an object of terror. At last, suffering from hallucinations, largely of sexual odors, she consults a physician. His first advice is marriage; however, when he learns that she has already tried that and even borne a child, he advocates as a last therapeutic experiment the actual practice of motherhood. Accordingly she fetches her sixteen-year-old daughter from the convent orphanage. The girl is graceless and unappealing and on sight awakens no sentiment but boredom. But while watching her asleep and half-clothed, Sophie is stirred by violent desire. And now in real horror of herself she leads the girl to the gate of Emmaline’s house where she can find her father and a true home, and entreats her to enter it and stay there. The book closes with an epilogue almost the literal duplicate of the prologue, for now the reader knows from what nightmare the doomed woman was seeking to escape when she plied her hypodermic needle. Marred though it is by excess in length, incident and style, this novel holds interest because of its effort to present a complete life history and to account for its lesbian element. The chief trouble is excess in this respect also. While the “morne demon” possessing “Méphistophéla” seems at the outset an hereditary syphilitic taint, the author says at one point: