and companionship, and many of my best friends have been ladies), I had a burning desire to have carnal intercourse with a male, and had the capacity for falling in love, as it is called, to the utmost extent.  In imagination, I possessed the female organ, and felt toward man exactly as an amorous female would.  At the time when I became fully conscious of my condition, I attached little importance to it; I had not a notion of its terrible import, nor of the future misery it would entail.  All that I had to learn by bitter experience.

“I did once think of forcing myself to have connection with a prostitute in order to see whether the actual sensual enjoyment might bring a change, and so have the power to marry.  But when it came to thinking over ways and means, my repugnance to the act became so strong that it was quite out of the question.  In the case of any male to whom I became attached, I wanted to feel ourselves together, skin to skin, and to be privileged to take such liberties as an amorous female would take if that were all permitted.  I sought no purely sensual gratification of any kind; my love was far too genuine for that.

“During the rather more than half a century which has elapsed since my twelfth birthday, I have been genuinely in love about thirteen times.  I despair attempting to give an idea of the depth and reality of my feelings.  I have alluded to my precocity.  I was in love when 12 years old, the object being a man of 24, a well-known analytical chemist.  He came to my father’s house very frequently; and my heart beat almost at the mention of his name.

“The next serious time I was about 15.  It was a farmer’s son, about two years older.  I don’t think that I was ever alone with him, and really only knew him as a member of his family, yet for a time he was my chief interest in life.

“When 21 I had a ‘chum,’ a youth of 17, who entertained for me, at any rate, a brotherly affection.  We were under the same roof, and early one summer morning he got out of bed and came direct to my room to talk about some matter or other.  In order to talk more comfortably he got into bed with me and we lay there just as two school-girls might have done.  This proximity was more than I could stand, and my heart began to beat so that it was impossible that he should not notice it.  As, of course, he could not have the slightest notion of the reason, he said in all innocence, ‘Why, how your heart beats.  I can hear it quite plainly.’

“So far my details are purely innocent.  Up to 18, familiarities passed at intervals between me and the son of the village doctor, a youth about two years older than myself, and precociously immoral.  I did not really care for him much, but he was my chief companion.  Then I became a school-assistant, and for about six years managed to control myself, only, alas, to fall again.  Another resolution I kept for