moves himself from the picture by touching the woodwork behind him with the tips of his slippery fingers.

and then he knew that he would fall. As his body began to plunge towards the drive he held his arms in a grotesque attitude as though to break his fall and he cried out; but not for mercy.

The end. But no, not quite the end for Tony Kent, for before a year had passed, he was reincarnated in an American jacket, and this time, as he stood at the same window, ready to jump or fall, he becomes ill: "pushed violently with his arms and toppled backward, striking his head on the stone floor." Does he get up and again make the attempt to plunge forward toward his doom? Not at all. In fact, he knew

that he had solved nothing and he persuaded himself that there was nothing to solve, all he had to do now was to go on living and be with Anson. He resolved firmly to try and be brave and to try and be good; to do more than that, he told himself, was not in his power.

It is precisely because the theme of homosexuality in fiction is so little understood by our writers that they themselves do not know how their own characters would behave under given circumstances. One cannot imagine two endings so diametrically opposed as illustrated by the above quotations. For the Queen's subjects, Tony Kent was not only torn away from the youth of whom he was so fond, but as a direct result of his attraction for this soldier, he brings about his own destruction. But, on this side of the Atlantic, he not only resists the selfannihilation, but actually returns to Anson.

The double ending is a phenomenon worth investigating. Is it characteristic only of novels on homosexuality, and if so, is this due to the authors' ambivalent attitude? That is to say, do these authors wish to demonstrate sympathy for their characters, on the one hand, and yet do they wish to accept the moral judgments of a hostile society, on the other? Do they want to see their protagonists live and adjust to a marginal life, as do most homosexuals, and at the same time do they fear that the public is unready to accept such a story, but will insist that those who have stayed to the cities of the plain must pay for their sin with disgrace and ultimately death?

For the serious man of letters, the double ending for different audiences raises questions as to the integrity of an author in his relationship with his own characters. How can the reader be expected to believe in Tony Kent, to understand him, to have him emerge as a real and rational total human being, whose decisions at important moments of his life are the logical end-results of his mind and personality, if Walter Baxter himself is not sufficiently familiar with Kent to know how he would behave at such moments? If Kent has any existence out-

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