“When barely 16 I slept one night with a woman of low morals.  She acted toward me in a sensual manner and aroused my sexual feelings.  I felt at the time that this was a sin, but I was carried away by passion.  Afterward I hated this woman and despised myself.

“I then went away to a co-educational boarding school.  Here for the first time I became happy.  A girl of my own age, of fine character and noticeable refinement, fell in love with me and caused me to reciprocate.  On retrospection I believe this to have been a genuine and beautiful love on both sides.  After a few months, however, our relation, at my initiative and against my friend’s will, became a physical one.  We expressed our affection by mutual caresses, close embraces and lying on each other’s bodies.  I sometimes touched her sexual organs sensually.  All this contact gave me exquisite thrills.  After three years we had a misunderstanding and separated.  I was greatly grieved and troubled for many years, and came to regret greatly the physical relationship that had existed between us.  My friend at length fell in love and married.  I had several other slighter infatuations for women, was courted by several men to whom I remained cold and bored except in one instance, where I was somewhat touched, and finally found a lasting friendship with a woman who had fallen deeply in love with me in her school days and had never been able to care for any one else.  She is a woman of considerable literary talent and of good general ability and high ideals.  She is usually much liked by men.  Her love for me is the most real thing in the world for me, and seems the most permanent.  At first my feeling for her was almost purely physical, although there were no sexual relations.  I hated this feeling and have succeeded in overcoming it pretty largely.  At times after long separations we have embraced with great passion, at least on my part.  This has always had a bad physical effect on me.  At present, however, it very rarely occurs.  We both consider sexual feelings degrading and deleterious to real love.  Whether at any time we have had complete physical satisfaction or gratification, I hardly know.  I have experienced very keen physical pleasure, mingled with what I took to be great mental exaltation and quickening of the emotions.  This condition was brought about by close contact with the body of my friend, usually by lying upon it.  But if by ‘gratification’ it is meant that desire, having been completely satisfied, ceases temporarily, I think I have never had that experience.  If I did, it was when I was about 18 when I lived with a girl friend in intimate relations.  Of late years, at any rate, it has never happened to me, and an embrace, however close, always leaves me with a desire for a closer union, both physical and spiritual.  So a few years since, I came to the conclusion