sensations, “mere, vague, uneasy feelings or momentary twitches, which took place alike in the vulva or the vagina or the uterus, not amounting to an orgasm and nothing like it.”  These sensations, it should be added, have continued into adult life.  “I always experience them just before menstruation, and afterward for a few days, and, occasionally, though it seems to me not so often, during the period itself.  I may have the sensation four or five times during the day; it is not dependent at all upon external impressions, or my own thoughts, and is sometimes absent for days together.  It is just one flash, as if you would snap your fingers, and it is over.”

As a child, she was, of course, quite unconscious that there was anything sexual in these sensations.  They were then usually associated with various imaginary scenes.  The one usually indulged in was that a black bear was waiting for her up in a tree, and that she was slowly raised up toward the bear by means of ropes and then lowered again, and raised, feeling afraid of being caught by the bear, and yet having a morbid desire to be caught.  In after years she realized that there was a physical sexual cause underlying these imaginations, and that what she liked was a feeling of resistance to the bear giving rise to the physical sensation.

At a somewhat later age, though while still a child, she cherished an ideal passion for a person very much older than herself, this passion absorbing her thoughts for a period of two years, during which, however, there was no progress made in physical sensation.  It was when she was nearly thirteen years of age, soon after the appearance of menstruation, and under the influence of this ideal passion, that she first learned to experience conscious orgasm, which was not associated with the thought of any person.  “I did not associate it with anything high or beautiful, owing to the fact that I had imbibed our current ideas in regard to sexual feelings, and viewed them in a very poor light indeed.”  She considers that her sexual feelings were stronger at this period than at any other time in her life.  She could, however, often deny herself physical satisfaction for weeks at a time, in order that she might not feel unworthy of the object of her ideal passion.  “As for the sexual satisfaction,” she writes, “it was experimental.  I had heard older girls speak of the pleasure of such feelings, but I was not taught anything by example, or otherwise.  I merely rubbed myself with the wash-rag while bathing, waiting for a result, and having the same peculiar feeling I had so often experienced.  I am not aware of any ill effects having resulted, but I felt degraded, and tried hard to overcome the habit.  No one had spoken to me of the habit, but from the secrecy of grown people, and passages I had heard from the Bible, I conceived the idea that it was a reprehensible practice.  And, while this did not curb my desire, it taught me self-control,