in how many ways my nature had the criminal instinct.  I wanted to see if I could become a thief.  I stole a silver button in a shop where antiquities were sold, but I went to the shop the same day again and returned the button, without the people knowing.  I found I could not become a thief.  Then the question came.  Why had I felt a criminal since my seventh year?  Was it my fault?  If not, whose fault was it?  Not till I studied Freud’s psychoanalytical system did I get a clear insight into my own character.

“When I was 20 years of age I met a gentleman one night in a heavy snow-storm.  We walked and talked and understood each other.  He belonged to one of Sweden’s first aristocratic families.  He was extremely refined.  He asked me to his rooms.  We undressed and lay down.  He had a very beautiful head and a still more beautiful body.  I think that all my erotic feelings were numbed by looking at his beautiful body.  To me anything sensual would have been sacrilege, I thought, and I can remember the feeling of awe which came over me.  He was them 20 years of age, but his hair was quite white.  First he did not understand, and then he was very gentle to me.  I kept perfectly chaste for three whole months after the sight of his body.  We saw each other often.  Eight years later we met for the last time.  He suffered much from melancholia.  At that time I prevented him from committing suicide.  This winter, however, he shot himself.

“At the age of 22 my sister introduced me to a charming, intelligent and refined, half-English, half-Swedish painter.  We ‘recognized’ each other at once, though we had never seen each other before, and even knew each other’s characters to the smallest traits.  My parents liked him better than any friend I had ever had.  My sister and he were from the first like sister and brother.  The first evening in my home he and I kissed each other.  The women were mad about him.  Later I found many men were too.  I was three weeks his senior.  He had his own rooms.  I have never felt any such wonderful harmony as when our naked bodies mingled.  It was like floating in ether.  With him it was the only time I had been active in fellatio.  We were much together, though not much physically, for he had many love affairs with women.  What I loved was the way he would cut off all advances of men, I was his ‘little brother’ and so he calls me to this day.  He is now married in America, and the father of a pretty little daughter.  We are the best of friends to this day.

“The two years in Copenhagen were some of the happiest I have spent, though nearly the whole time I was in physical pain.  In Austria I found, among the Tyrolese peasants, that the Englishmen, who come there in winter for sports and in the summer for mountain climbing, have demoralized the young male peasants with money.  Homosexual intercourse is easy to get if you are willing to pay the price,—­larger in season, less out of season.

    “In Italy it is merely a question of money or passion, but
    everything in love there is quite transient.