unaware.  I certainly admired the liveliest and cleverest girls and made friends with them and disliked the common, lumpy, uneducated type that made two-thirds of my companions.  The lively girls liked me, and I made several nice friends whom I have kept ever since.  One girl of about 15 took a violent liking for me and figuratively speaking licked the dust from my shoes.  I would never take any notice of her.  When I was nearly 16 one of my teachers began to notice me and be very kind to me.  She was twenty years older than I was.  She seemed to pity my loneliness and took me out for walks and sketching, and encouraged me to talk and think.  It was the first time in my life that anyone had ever sympathized with me or tried to understand me and it was a most beautiful thing to me.  I felt like an orphan child who had suddenly acquired a mother, and through her I began to feel less antagonistic to grown people and to feel the first respect I had ever felt for what they said.  She petted me into a state of comparative docility and made the other teachers like and trust me.  My love for her was perfectly pure, and I thought of her’s as simply maternal.  She never roused the least feeling in me that I can think of as sexual.  I liked her to touch me and she sometimes held me in her arms or let me sit on her lap.  At bedtime she used to come and say good-night and kiss me upon the mouth.  I think now that what she did was injudicious to a degree, and I wish I could believe it was as purely unselfish and kind as it seemed to me then.  After I had left school I wrote to her and visited her during a few years.  Once she wrote to me that if I could give her employment she would come and live with me.  Once when she was ill with neurasthenia her friends asked me to go to the seaside with her, which I did.  Here she behaved in an extraordinary way, becoming violently jealous over me with another elderly friend of mine who was there.  I could hardly believe my senses and was so astonished and disgusted that I never went near her again.  She also accused me of not being ‘loyal’ to her; to this day I have no idea what she meant.  She then wrote and asked me what was wrong between us, and I replied that after the words she had had with me my confidence in her was at an end.  It gave me no particular pang as I had by this time outgrown the simple gratitude of my childish days and not replaced it by any stronger feeling.  All my life I have had the profoundest repugnance to having any ‘words’ with other women.

“I was much less interested in sex matters than other children of my age.  I was altogether less precocious, though I knew more, I imagine, than other girls.  Nevertheless, by the time I was 15 social matters had begun to interest me greatly.  It is difficult to say how this happened, as I was forbidden all books and newspapers (except in my holidays when I had generally a reading orgy, though not the books I needed or wanted).  I had abundant opportunities