The power which gave me life seemed to insist on my doing that for which the same power would sting me with remorse.  If there is no remedy I must either cry out against the injustice of this life of torment between nature and conscience, or submit to the blind trust of baffled ignorance.  If there is a remedy life will not seem to be such an intolerable ordeal.  I am not pleading that I must succumb to impulse.  I do not doubt that a pure celibate life is possible so far as action is concerned.  But I cannot discover that friendship with younger men can go on uncolored by a sensuous admixture which fills me with shame and loathing.  The gratification of passion—­normal or abnormal—­is repulsive to esthetic feeling.  I am nearly 42 and I have always diverted myself from personal interests that threatened to become dangerous to me.  More than a year ago, however, a new fate seemed to open to my unhappy and lonely life.  I became intimate with a young man of 20, of the rarest beauty of form and character.  I am confident that he is and always has been pure.  He lives an exalted moral and religious life dominated by the idea that he and all men are partners of the divine nature, and able in the strength of that nature to be free from evil.  I believe him to be normal.  He shows pleasure in the society of attractive young women and in an innocent, light-hearted way refers to the time when he may be able to marry.  He is a general favorite, but turned to me as to a friend and teacher.  He is poor, and it was possible for me to guarantee him a good education.  I began to help him from the longings of a lonely life.  I wanted a son and a friend in my inward desolation.  I craved the companionship of this pure and happy nature.  I felt such a reverence for him that I hoped to find the sensuous element in me purged away by his purity.  I am, indeed, utterly incapable of doing him harm; I am not morally weak; nevertheless the sensuous element is there, and it poisons my happiness.  He is ardently affectionate and demonstrative.  He spends the summers with me in Europe, and the tenderness he feels for me has prompted him at times to embrace and kiss me as he always has done to his father.  Of late I have begun to fear that without will or desire I may injure the springs of feeling in him, especially if it is true that the homosexual tendency is latent in most men.  The love he shows me is my joy, but a poisoned joy.  It is the bread and wine of life to me; but I dare not think what his ardent affection might ripen into.  I can go on fighting the battle of good and evil in my attachment to him, but I cannot define my duty to him.  To shun him would be cruelty and would belie his trust in human fidelity.  Without my friendship he will not take my money—­the condition of a large career.  I might, indeed, explain to him what I explain to you, but the ordeal and shame are too great, and I cannot see what good it would do.  If he has the capacity of homosexual feeling he might be violently stimulated; if he