“At about the same time I chanced to be, for a few months, in a German university town, and I determined, as I had the opportunity, to carry the parental advice to the logical conclusion.  I tried a licensed house.  The place was clean and decent, and the conditions, I take it, such as one would normally find in any properly regulated continental city; but to me the whole thing appeared unspeakably horrible.  It was a purely commercial transaction, and it had not even the redeeming element of risk to one’s self, or of offense against a social or disciplinary code.  I came away feeling that I had touched bottom in my sexual experiences, and I understood what it was that Faust saw when the red mouse sprang from the mouth of the witch in the Walpurgis dance.

“These were the only occasions upon which I have had sexual intercourse with women.  Looking back to them now, they appear to me to have been almost inevitable; but if I had my life over again I would shun them as I would a lethal draught.  I believe I came out of the fire unscathed; probably, indeed, it did me good, in the sense that it made it possible for me to look deeper into life; though to what extent seeing the torments of the damned makes us do this, perhaps only a Dante could tell.  To gain knowledge at the expense of the shame and misery of others I hold to be fundamentally wrong and immoral.  What is to me, however, the chief and bitterest thought is that I flung away the first spring of manhood where I got no love in return.  His virginity is, or should be, as glorious and sacred a possession to a youth as to a maiden; to be guarded jealously; to be given only at the call of love, to one who loves him—­be it comrade, mistress, or wife—­and whom he can love in return.

“The full university life into which I now entered at the age of 20 brought with it a flood of new ideas, feelings and sensations.  The friendships I made there will always remain the central ones in my life.  Up to my last term at college at the age of 24 I still wore my chain-mail of artificial chastity; but then a change gradually set in, and I began to understand the relationship of the physical phenomena of sex to its intellectual and imaginative manifestations. (I was not destined to fully realize this for some years and then exclusively through and out of my own personal experience.) It was the study of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass that first brought me light upon this question.  Hitherto I had kept the two things locked up, as it were, in two separate air-tight compartments,—­my friendships in one, my sex instincts in another,—­to be kept under and repressed by the public-school code as I conceived it.

“It is needless to say that I was continually troubled by the customary sex phenomena:  erotic dreams, loss of semen, troublesome