No books or ideas came near me but what I went in search of.  Another thing that helped me to take an expansive view of life at this time was my intense love of Nature.  All birds and animals affected me by their beauty and grace, and I have always kept a profound sympathy with them as well as some subtle understanding which enables me to tame them, at times remarkably.  I not only loved all other creatures, but I believed that men and women were the most beautiful things in the universe and I would rather look at them (unclothed) than on any other thing, as my greatest pleasure.  I was prepared to like them because they were beautiful.  When the time came for me to leave school I rather dreaded it, chiefly because I dreaded my life at home.  I had a great longing at this time to run away and try my fortune anywhere; possibly if I had been stronger I might have done so.  But I was in very poor health through the physical crushing I had had, and in very poor spirits through this and my mental repression.  I still knew myself a prisoner and I was bitterly disappointed and ashamed at having no education.  I afterward had myself taught arithmetic and other things.

“The next period of my life which covered about six years was not less important to my development, and was a time of extreme misery to me.  It found me, on leaving school, almost a child.  This time between 18 and 24 should, I think, count as my proper period of puberty, which probably in most children occupies the end years of their school-life.

“It was at this time that I began to make a good many friends of my own and to become aware of psychical and sexual attractions.  I had never come across any theories on the subject, but I decided that I must belong to a third sex of some kind.  I used to wonder if I was like the neuter bees!  I knew physical and psychical sex feeling and yet I seemed to know it quite otherwise from other men and women.  I asked myself if I could endure living a woman’s life, bearing children and doing my duty by them.  I asked myself what hiatus there could be between my bodily structure and my feelings, and also what was the meaning of the strong physical feelings which had me in their grip without choice of my own. [Experience of physical sex sensations first began about 16 in sleep; masturbation was accidentally discovered at the age of 19, abandoned at 28, and then at 34 deliberately resumed as a method of purely physical relief.] These three things simply would not be reconciled and I said to myself that I must find a way of living in which there was as little sex of any kind as possible.  There was something that I simply lacked; that I never doubted.  Curiously enough, I thought that the ultimate explanation might be that there were men’s minds in women’s bodies, but I was more concerned in finding a way of life than in asking riddles without answers.

“I thought that one day when I