one of which persistently obsessed me:  with these obviously compensatory differences, why might not the girl and I effect some sort of copulation?  This fantasy, drawn exclusively from that unique experience, charmed with its grotesqueness only, for at that time my sense of sex was but inchoate and my knowledge of it was nothing.  The bizarre conceit, submitted to the equally ignorant girl and approved, was borne to the paternal hay-loft and there, with much bungling, brought to surprising and pleasurable consummation.

    “In the four ensuing years I repeated the act not seldom with
    this girl and with others.

“When I was 11 my sister and I were taken by our parents to Europe, where we remained six years, attending school each winter in a different city and, during the summer, travelling in various countries.

“Abroad my lust was glutted to the full:  the amenable girl-playmate was ubiquitous, whom I plied with ardor at Swiss hotels, German watering-places, French pensions,—­where not?  Toward puberty I first repaired at times to prostitutes.

    “Masturbation, excepting a few experiments, I never resorted to. 
    Few of my schoolmates avowedly practised it.

“Of homosexuality my sole hearing was through the classics, where, with no long pondering, I opined it merely our modern comradery, poetically aggrandized, masquerading in antique habiliments and phraseology.  It never came home to me; it attuned to no tone in the scale of my sympathies; I possessed no touchstone for transmitting the recitals of those ambiguous amours into fiery messages.  The relation to my own sex was, intellectually, an occasional friendship devoid of strong affection; physically, a mild antagonism, the naked body of a man was slightly repellant.  Statues of women evoked both carnal and esthetic response; of men, no emotions whatever, save a deepening of that native antipathy.  Similarly in paintings, in literature, the drama, the men served but as foils for the delicious maidens, who visited my aerial seraglios and lapped me in roseate dreamings.

    “In my eighteenth year we returned to America, where I entered
    the university.

“The course of my love of women was now a little erratic; normal connection began to lose fascination.  As long ago I had formulated untutored the rationale of coitus, so now imagination, groping in the dark, conceived a fresh fillip for the appetite—­cunnilinctus.  But this, though for a while quite adequate, soon ceased to gratify.  At this juncture, Christmas of my first college year, I was appointed editor of a small magazine, an early stricture of whose new conduct was paucity of love stories.  Such improvident neglect was in keeping with my altering view of women, a view accorded to me by self-dissipation of the glamour through which they had been wont to appear.  I had wandered somehow behind