May Bookstaver enrolled in Johns Hopkins Medical School, which had recently begun to admit women students. Another student, Mabel Haynes, suddenly dropped her "friendship" with Lounsbury and began an affair with May.

In the meantime, also Gertrude Stein, despite her professed horror of "passion in its many disguised forms," fell precipitously in love with Bookstaver. They seemed to have had a quiet steamy lil love triangle going on which may have inspired more than one of her novels.

But, confronted by an experienced and formidable rival, as well as by her own moral crises and sexual naïveté, Stein found herself excluded from the Bookstaver-Haynes romance. Indeed, May stayed temporarily with Mabel, and both women subsequently ended their college affair and, obedient to societal and familial dictates, married men.