generally a la Tricotrin, with a violin in one pocket and an Atravante Dante in the other.  To do this satisfactorily to ourselves we must be artists, and I resolved to go in for music and become a second Liszt.  When my father offered to take us to Italy, the artist’s Mecca, for a couple of years, we were wild with delight.  We went, and disillusionment began.  It may perhaps seem absurd, but we suffered acutely that first summer.  Our villa was quite on the beach, the lowest of its flight of steps being washed by the Mediterranean.  At the back were grounds which seemed a paradise.  Long alleys covered over with vines and carpeted with long grass and poppies, grassy slopes dotted with olives and ilex, roses everywhere, and almost every flower in profusion, with, at night, the fireflies and the heavy scents of syringa and orange blossoms.  In the midst of every possible excitement to the senses there was one thing wanting, and we did not know what that was.

“We attributed our restlessness and dissatisfaction to the slow progress in our artistic education, and consoled ourselves by thinking when once we had mastered the technical difficulties we should feel all right.  And of course we did derive a very real pleasure from all the beauties of art and nature with which Italy abounds.

“It seems to me, however, that the art craze is one of the modern phases of woman’s sexual life.  When we were in Italy the great centers of the country were simply overrun with girls studying art, most of whom had very little talent, but who had mistaken the restlessness due to the first awakening of the sexual instinct for the divine flame of genius.  In our case it did not matter, as we were not dependent upon our own exertions.  But it must have been terribly hard for girls who had burned their boats and chosen art as a career, to have added to the repression of their natural desires the bitterness of knowing that in their chosen walk of life they were failures.  The results as far as work goes might not be so bad if the passions, as in men, were occasionally gratified.  It is the constant drudgery combined with the disappointment and finding that art alone does not satisfy which is so paralyzing.  Besides, sexual gratification is always followed by exaltation of the mental faculties, with, in my experience, no depressing reaction such as follows pleasure excited by mental causes alone.

“At one time when living at the villa I met a man about 45, who took rather a fancy to me.  I mention this because it woke me up; no emotion was excited, but I realized for the first time (I must have been nearly 20) that I was no longer a child, and that a man could think of me in connection with love.  It was only after this, and not immediately after, either, that men’s society began to have an interest for me, and that I began to think a man’s love would be a pleasant thing to possess, after all.