the scenes, and beheld, no footlights of sex intervening, the once so radiant fairies resolved into a raddled humanity, as likable as ever, but desirable no longer.

“Soon after this the Oscar Wilde case was bruiting about.  The newspaper accounts of it, while illuminating, flashed upon me no light of self-revelation; they only amended some idle conjectures as to certain mystic vices I had heard whispered of.  Here and there a newspaper allusion still too recondite was painstakingly clarified by an effeminate fellow-student, who, I fancy now, would have shown no reluctance had I begged him to adduce practical illustration.  I purchased, too, photographs of Oscar Wilde, scrutinizing them under the unctuous auspices of this same emasculate and blandiloquent mentor.  If my interest in Oscar Wilde arose from any other emotion than the rather morbid curiosity then almost universal, I was not conscious of it.

“Erotic dreams, precluded hitherto by coition, came now to beset me.  The persons of these dreams were (and still are) invariably women, with this one remembered exception:  I dreamed that Oscar Wilde, one of my photographs of him incarnate, approached me with a buffoon languishment and perpetrated fellatio, an act verbally expounded shortly before by my oracle.  For a month or more, recalling this dream disgusted me.

“The few subsequent endeavors, tentative and half-hearted, to repristinate my venery were foredoomed, partly because I had feared they were, to failure:  erection was incomplete, ejaculation without pleasure.

“There seemed a fallacy in this behavior.  Why coitus without sensual desire for it?  No sense of duty impelled me, nor dread of sexual aberration.  The explanation is this:  attraction to females was not expunged, simply sublimed; my imagination, no longer importing women from observation, created its own delectable sirens, grown exacting and transcendental, petitioned reality in vain.  Substance had receded for good now, and soon even these tormenting shadows of it became ever dimmer and dimmer, until they too at length faded into nothingness.

“The antipodes of the sexual sphere turned more and more toward the light of my tolerance.  Inversion, till now stained with a slight repugnance, became esthetically colorless at last, and then delicately retinted, at first solely with pity for its victims, but finally, the color deepening, with half-conscious inclination to attach it to myself as a remote contingency.  This revolution, however, was not without external impetus.  The prejudiced tone of a book I was reading, Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, by prompting resentment, led me on to sympathy.  My championing, purely abstract though it was to begin with, none the less involved my looking at things with eyes hypothetically inverted,—­an orientation for the sake of argument.  After a while, insensibly and at