her armpits displeased me, and still more that on the lower part of her body.  In the case of men, directly I came to have cognizance of the same thing on their bodies, the effect was exactly the opposite.  It so happened that about this time the gardener had received some injury to his leg, and in showing the bruise to another exhibited before my eyes a skin completely shagged over with dark hair.  Though the sight of the bruise repulsed me, my pleasure was intense, and the vision of the gardener’s legs was in my bed every night for a week afterward.  My point is that the sight of my nurse was liable to rouse interest just as much as the far more prosaic display of the gardener’s wounded leg, but my nature made it impossible.

“It was about this time, if not before, that an enormous sense of shyness with regard to all my private duties began to afflict me.  So great was it that I could endure from no hand except my mother’s or my nurse’s the necessary assistance in the buttoning and unbuttoning of my garments, always excepting those who were about my own age, toward whom I felt no privacy whatever.

“When I was a little more than 5 I formed a friendship with a young clerk, a youth of about 15, though he seemed to me a grown-up person.  One day, as he sat at his desk writing, I sat down and began playing with his feet, investigating the height to which his socks went under his trousers; in this way I obtained six inches of bare leg.  Conscious of my courage I fell to kissing it.  My friend laughed, but left me to my devotions in peace.  This was the first time in which a feeling of romance mixed itself in my dreams; the physical excitement was less, but the pleasure was greater.  I cannot understand why I never repeated the experience.  He remained to me an object of very special and tender consideration.

“In the next episode I have to relate the ideal was totally absent, and the part I played was passive rather than active.  I was put to sleep with a boy considerably my senior.  His initiation led to a physical familiarity between us which was not warm or kind, and I was allowed no scope for my own instinctive desires for a warmer kind of contact; if I sought it under cover of my companion’s slumbers I found myself kicked away.  Only on one occasion did I find a few moments of supreme charm, while his sleep remained sound, by discovering in the recesses of the sheet an exposed surface of flesh against which I pressed my face in an abandonment of joy.  For the rest I was a passive participant, his pleasure seeming to end in the mere handling of the fleshy portions of my body.  For this purpose I usually lay face downward across his knees.  So far as I can remember, this intimacy led to a decrease in my pursuit of imaginative pleasures; for about a year no further development took place.

    “At about this date I was circumcised on account of the prepuce
    being too long.