up their effect on me.  I only know that some women attract me and some tempt me physically, and have done ever since I was about 22 or 23.  I know that psychically I have always been more interested in women than in men, but have not considered them the best companions or confidants.  I feel protective towards them, never feel jealous of them, and hate having differences with them.  And I feel always that I am not one of them.  If there had been any period in my life when health, and temptation and money and opportunity had made homosexual relations easy I cannot say how I should have resisted.  I think that I have never had any such relations simply because I have in a way been safeguarded from them.  For a long time I thought I must do without all actual sexual relations and acted up to that.  If I had thought any relations right and possible I think I should have striven for heterosexual experiences because of the respect that I had cultivated, indeed I think always had, for the normal and natural.  If I had thought it right to indulge any sort of gratification which was within my reach I think I might probably have chosen the homosexual as being perhaps more satisfying and more convenient.  I always wanted love and friendship first; later I should have been glad of something to satisfy my sex hunger too, but by that time I could have done without it, or I thought so.”

At a period rather later than that dealt with in this narrative, the subject of it became strongly attracted to a man who was of somewhat feminine and abnormal disposition.  But on consideration she decided that it would not be wise to marry him.

The commonest characteristic of the sexually inverted woman is a certain degree of masculinity or boyishness.  As I have already pointed out, transvestism in either women or men by no means necessarily involves inversion.  In the volume of Women Adventurers, edited by Mrs. Norman for the Adventure Series, there is no trace of inversion; in most of these cases, indeed, love for a man was precisely the motive for adopting male garments and manners.  Again, Colley Cibber’s daughter, Charlotte Charke, a boyish and vivacious woman, who spent much of her life in men’s clothes, and ultimately wrote a lively volume of memoirs, appears never to have been attracted to women, though women were often attracted to her, believing her to be a man; it is, indeed, noteworthy that women seem, with special frequency, to fall in love with disguised persons of their own sex.[166] There is, however, a very pronounced tendency among sexually inverted women to adopt male attire when practicable.  In such cases male garments are not usually regarded as desirable chiefly on account of practical convenience, nor even in order to make an impression on other women, but because the wearer feels more at home in them.  Thus, Moll mentions the case of a young governess of 16 who, while still unconscious of her sexual perversion, used to find pleasure, when everyone was out of the house, in putting on the clothes of a youth belonging to the family.