repugnance to trying the experiment; it would seem to materialize it too much.  As a child and a girl I was contented to arrive at the second stage, possibly because I did not realize that there was any other, and perhaps this is why I have experienced no evil results.

“In dreams the third stage seems to come suddenly without any leading up to it, either mental or physical, of which I am conscious.  I do not, however, remember having any such dreams before I was engaged.  They came at a later period; even then, when great pleasure was experienced, it came, as a rule, suddenly and sharply, with no dreams leading up to it.  The dreams generally take a sad form (an Evangeline and Gabriel business), where one vainly seeks the person who eludes one.  I have, however, sometimes had pleasurable dreams of men who were quite indifferent to me and of whom I never thought when awake.  The impression on waking is so strong one could almost fancy one’s self really in love with them.  I can quite understand falling in love with a person by dreaming of him in this way.

“The first time I remember experiencing the third stage in waking moments was at a picnic, when the man, to whom I have before referred as the first that I fancied I cared for, leaned against me accidentally in passing a plate or dish; but I was already in a violent state of excitement at being with him.  There was no possibility of anything between us, as he was married.  If he guessed my feelings, they were never admitted, as I did my best to hide them.  I never experienced this, except at the touch of some one I loved. (I think the saying about the woman ’desiring the desire of the man’ is just about as true as most epigrams.  It is the man’s personality alone which affects me.  His feelings toward me are of—­I was going to say—­indifference, but at any rate quite secondary importance, and the gratification of my own vanity counts as nothing in such relations.)

“As a rule, to reach even the second stage the exciting ideas must be associated with some particular person, except in the case of a story, where one identifies one’s self with one of the characters.  In childhood and early youth it was, in the case of religion, the idea of God and the presence and the personality of God which aroused my feelings and always seemed very vivid to me.  In the case of my governess, my feelings were aroused in exactly the same way as later they would be by one’s lover.  In the art craze I am rather vague as to how it came about, but I think, as a rule, there was rather a craving for pleasure than pleasure itself.  I do not remember ever thinking much about the physical feeling.  It seemed as natural that a pleasant emotion should produce pleasant physical effects as that a painful one should cause tears.  As a child, one takes so much for granted, and later on my mind was so much occupied with worrying about the truth of religion that I hardly thought enough about anything