of exhaustion.  If repeated several times in the course of a single day the acts are followed by dullness and lassitude; otherwise the feeling of exhaustion passes away quickly and a sense of relief and quiet takes its place.  So natural or rather habitual has this resort to masturbation as a means of relief from nervousness and restlessness become that the act is almost instinctive in its unconsciousness.

I am extremely sensitive to all kinds of sexual influences, and have an insatiable curiosity regarding everything that pertains to the sexual life of men or women.  I am not, however, excited sexually by conversation about sexual facts and relationships, no matter what its nature, though in reading erotic literature my excitement is often intense.

The tendency to day dream has never left me, but there are no longer any elaborate scenes or long-continued “stories,” these having been replaced by vaguely imagined incidents which are usually broken off before they reach a satisfactory climax.  They are always interrupted by the intrusion of other matters, usually of more practical interest; and the long-continued habit of satisfying myself by masturbation has made erotic dreams rather tantalizing than pleasurable.  I dream very seldom at night—­at least I can scarcely ever remember any dreams upon waking—­and practically never of sexual relations.  I have not had a nocturnal emission for over three years, and probably not more than twenty-five in my life.

In my “love passages” with girls there has been no serious thought of coitus on my part, and I have never had intercourse with a woman—­unless my early experiences with the servant girl be called such.  Like all masturbators I always idealized “love” to the utter exclusion of all sensual cravings; and the notion that the physical act of coitus was something degrading and destructive of real love rather than its consummation was, of all prejudices I have ever formed, the most difficult to escape—­a circumstance due, I suppose, to the fact that all I had ever been taught on the subject tended to the complete divorce of what was called “love” from what was stigmatized as a “base sensual desire.”  Judging from my own experience and observation I should say that “ideal love” is a mere surface feeling, bound to disappear as soon as it has gained its object by arousing a reciprocal interest on the part of the one to whom it is directed.  So little did I “materialize” the objects of my “love” that I have never cared for kissing or the warm embraces in which lovers usually indulge.  I have never kissed but one girl, and her with far too little enthusiasm to satisfy her.  My last sweetheart was a very passionate girl, the warmth of whose embraces was somewhat torrid and, to me, both puzzling and annoying.  The intensity of feeling which demanded such strenuous expression was beyond my knowledge of human nature.  A somewhat peculiar