at a period when she was quite ignorant of sex matters.  “The very first,” she writes, “was at the age of 6.  I remember once sitting astride a banister while my parents were waiting for me outside.  I distinctly remember a pleasurable sensation—­probably in part due to a physical feeling—­in the thought of staying there when I knew I ought to have run out to them.  From that year till the age of 10 I simply reveled in the idea of being tortured.  I went gladly to bed every night to imagine myself a slave, chained, beaten, made to carry loads and do ignominious work.  One of my imaginings, I remember, was that I was chained to a moldering skeleton.”  As she grew older these fancies were discontinued.  At the same time there was a trace of sadistic tendency:  “I used to frighten and tease a young child, driven to it by an irresistible impulse, and experiencing a certain pleasurable feeling in so doing.  But this, I am glad to say, was rare, as I hate all cruelty.”

One of her favorite imaginings as a child was that she was a boy, and especially that she was a knight rescuing damsels in distress.  She was not fond of girls’ occupations, and has always had a sort of chivalrous feeling toward women.

“When I first heard of the sexual act,” she writes, “it appeared to me so absurd that I took little notice.  About the age of 10 I discussed it a good deal with other girls, and we used to play childishly indecent games—­out of pure mischief and not from any definite physical feeling.”

About a year after menstruation was established she accidentally discovered the act of masturbation by leaning over a table.  “I discovered it naturally; no one taught me; and the very naturalness of the impulse that led me to it often made me in later years question the harmfulness.”  Both her sisters masturbated from a very early age, but not, to her knowledge, her brother.  The practice of masturbation was continued.  “For many years, imbued with the old ideas of morality, I struggled against it in vain.  The sight of animals copulating, the perusal of various books (Shakespeare, Rabelais, Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin, etc.), the sight of the nude in some Bacchanalian pictures (such as Rubens’s), all aroused passion.  Coexistent with this—­perhaps (though I doubt it) due to it—­arose a disgust for normal intercourse.  I fell in love and enjoyed kisses, etc., but the mere thought of anything beyond disgusted me.  Had my lover suggested such a thing I would have lost all love for him.  But all this time I went on masturbating, though as seldom as possible and without thought of my lover.  Love was to me a thing ideal and quite apart from lust, and I still think that it is false to try to connect the two.  I fear that even now, if I fell in love, sexual intercourse would break the charm.  At the age of 18 I came across Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata and was overjoyed to find all I had thought written