“Dreaming was forced upon me.  I dreamed fairy-tales by night and social dreams by day.  In the nightdreams, sometimes in the day-dreams, I was always the prince or the pirate, rescuing beauty in distress, or killing the unworthy.  I had one dream which I dreamed over and over again and enjoyed and still sometimes dream.  In this I was always hunting and fighting, often in the dark; there was usually a woman or a princess, whom I admired, somewhere in the background, but I have never really seen her.  Sometimes I was a stowaway on board ship or an Indian hunter or a backwoodsman making a log-cabin for my wife or rather some companion.  My daythoughts were not about the women round about me, or even about the one who was so kind to me; they were almost impersonal.  I went on, at any rate, from myself to what I thought the really ideal and built up a very beautiful vision of solid human friendship in which there was everything that was strong and wholesome on either side, but very little of sex.  To imagine this in its fullness I had to imagine all social, family, and educational conditions vastly different from anything I had come across.  From this my thoughts ran largely on social matters.  In whatever direction my thoughts ran I always surveyed them from the point of view of a boy.  I was trying to wait patiently till I could escape from slavery and starvation, and trying to keep the open mind I have spoken of, though I never opened a book of poetry, or a novel, or a history, but I slipped naturally back into my non-girl’s attitude and read it through my own eyes.  All my surface-life was a sham, and only through books, which were few, did I ever see the world naturally.  A consideration of social matters led me to feel very sorry for women, whom I regarded as made by a deliberate process of manufacture into the fools I thought they were, and by the same process that I myself was being made one.  I felt more and more that men were to be envied and women pitied.  I lay stress on this for it started in me a deliberate interest in women as women.  I began to feel protective and kindly toward women and children and to excuse women from their responsibility for calamities such as my school-career.  I never imagined that men required, or would have thanked me for, any sort of sympathy.  But it came about in these ways, and without the least help that I can trace, that by the time I was 19 years of age I was keenly interested in all kinds of questions:  pity for downtrodden women, suffrage questions, marriage laws, questions of liberty, freedom of thought, care of the poor, views of Nature and Man and God.  All these things filled my mind to the exclusion of individual men and women.  As soon as I left school I made a headlong plunge into books where these things were treated; I had the answers to everything to find after a long period of enforced starvation.  I had to work for my knowledge.