“Between the 6th and 7th years a change of environment brought me into contact with a new set of faces.  I had then a bed to myself, and once more my imagination awoke to life.  It was at this time that I found myself constructing from men’s faces suppositions as to the rest of their bodies:  a brown face led me to suppose a uniformly brown body, a pale face a pale body.  This idea of variety began to charm me.  I now made definite choice in my reveries whether I would go to sleep between white thighs, or red thighs, or brown thighs.  Going to sleep definitely describes the goal of the method to which I had addicted myself.  As soon as I entered my bed I abandoned myself to the construction of an amour and retained it as long as I had consciousness.  I may say that I was not conscious of any emissions under these circumstances (until some years later, when I brought it about by my own act), but the pleasure was fairly acute.

“All this time there were secret meetings, with my bedfellow of the year before.  But they now took place by day, in various hiding-places, with little unclothing or exposure, and my companion was cold and fastidious and repelled any warmth on my part; it became to me a dry sort of ritual.  I had an idea at that time that the whole thing was so much an original invention of his and mine that there was no likelihood of it being practised by anyone else in the world.  But this consideration did not restrain me in constructing love scenes with all those whose appearance attracted me.  At this period nearly every man with whom I came in contact won at least my transient desire; only the quite old and deformed lay outside the scope of my wishes.  Many of my amours developed in church; the men who sat near me were the objects of my attention, and the clergyman, whose sermon I did not listen to, supplied me with an occasion for reverie on the charms his person would have for me under other circumstances.  It must have been at this time that I began to elaborate ideas of a serried rank of congregated thighs across which I lay and was dragged.  I would arrange them in definite order and then imagine myself drawn across from one to the other somewhat forcibly.  Admiration of strength was beginning at this time to have a definite part in my conceptions, but anything of the nature of cruelty had not then appealed to me. (I except the original dream of my childhood, which seems to me still to stand fantastically apart.) In the inventions to which I now gave myself the sense of being passed across limbs of different texture and color was subtle and pleasurable.  I think the note of constructive cruelty which now followed arose from an imagined rivalry among my lovers for possession of me; the idea that I was desired made me soon take a delight in imagining myself torn and snatched about by the contending parties.  Presently out of this I began constructing definite scenes of violence.  I was able in imagination