politics, art.  Sometimes I visited them or we went on exploring expeditions to many country places or towns.  They all in the end either had love affairs or married.  I know that in spite of all our free conversations they never talked to me as they did to each other; we were always a little shy with each other.  But I got very fond of at least four of them.  I admired them and when I was tired and worried I often thought how easily, if I had been a man, I could have married and settled down with one or the other.  I used to think it would be delightful to have a woman to work for and take care of.  My attraction to these women was very strong, but I don’t think they knew it.  I seldom even kissed them, but I should often have cheerfully given them a good hugging and kissing if I had thought it a right or proper thing to do.  I never wanted them to kiss me half so much as I wanted to kiss them.  In these years I felt this with every woman I admired.

“Occasionally, I experienced slight erections when close to other women.  I am sure that no deliberate thought of mine caused them, and as I had them at other times too, when I was not expecting them, I think it may have been accidental.  What I felt with my mind and what I felt with my body always at this time seemed apart.  I cannot accurately describe the interest and attraction that women then were to me.  I only know I never felt anything like it for men.  All my feelings of desire to do kindnesses, to give presents, to be liked and respected and all such natural small matters, referred to women, not to men, and at this time, both openly and to myself, I said unhesitatingly that I liked women best.  It must be remembered that at this time a dislike for men was being fostered in me by those who wanted me to marry, and this must have counted for more than I now remember.

“As regards my physical sexual feelings, which were well established during these few years, I don’t think I often indulged in any erotic imaginations worth estimating, but so far as I did at all, I always imagined myself as a man loving a woman.  I cannot recall ever imagining the opposite, but I seldom imagined anything at all, and I suppose ultimate sex sensations know no sex.

    “But as time went on and my physical and psychical feelings met,
    at any rate in my own mind, I became fully aware of the meaning
    of love and even, of homosexual possibilities.

“I should probably have thought more of this side of things except that during this time I was so worried by the difficulty of living in my home under the perpetual friction of comparison with other people.  My life was a sham; I was an actor never off the boards.  I had to play at being a something I was not front morning till night, and I had no cessation of the long fatigue I had had at school; in addition I had sex to deal with actively and consciously.

“Looking back on these twenty-four