a pigeon kiss.  This modus operandi was much appreciated by me.  One night, after we had been together thus, I dreamt of her and her maneuvers and had my first emission.  I was very proud of this, as I considered that I had at last attained to man’s estate, and told her of it.  She never allowed me to insert my penis into her vulva after that, alleging that she did not want to have a baby.

I was about 161/2 years old when I had my first real coitus, my partner in the act being a girl some two years older than I, who lived near us.  I enjoyed the act very much, as she permitted, nay insisted on, emission intra vaginam, and told her that this was much nicer than my amours with the maidservant which of course I had confided to her.  She laughed, and said:  “Of course.”  We often copulated, as long as I was at home, and then I lost sight of her.  Of all the women with whom I have had to do, save one, she had the most copious secretion of mucus, which in those days I believed was the woman’s semen.  Her thighs used to be wet with it.

At the University I had regular relations with women of all sorts, rarely missing a week.  Two of them were married women, one the wife of a solicitor, the other of a doctor.  How proud I felt of my first intrigue with a married woman!  I felt that I was really a man of the world now!

But though my friends used to tell me all about their love affairs, and I longed to confide in them, I did not do so.  This was because when I went up to the University, my uncle said that he would give me a word of advice and hoped that I would follow it—­never to give away a woman, and never to refuse to respond to a woman’s advances, whoever she were.  To neglect this advice would, he said, be foolish, and to break the rules “damned ungentlemanly.”  I wish I had always followed advice proffered, as closely as I have followed this.  One night, when I was somewhat disguised in liquor, as our grandfathers would have put it, I picked up a girl, who was a private prostitute, if the phrase be permissible.  She declined copulation, and proposed other means of satisfaction.  I insisted, being stubborn in my cups.  Had I been sober I should have done as she suggested, for I have always made it a point to allow the woman to choose the method of gratification, and not to demand, or even suggest, anything myself.  I like to please women, and I have always been curious as to their wants and desires, as revealed, without outside influence, by themselves.  The result of my refusing all methods of gratification save the most ordinary was that the girl, who must have known that she was not all right, but shrank from saying so in so many words, gave me a gonorrhoea, which lasted nine weeks and much interfered with my amours, as I naturally declined to run the risk of infecting my partner, a risk which to my certain knowledge many a young fellow has run, with disastrous consequence to the confiding woman.