off some of their relatives, and that they had gradually come to like doing it.  All who told me that they masturbated, asked me whether I did so too, and two desired me to show them the act, one alleging that she liked to see a man do it; she had been married late in life, after a “stormy youth” and had had, she said, a large experience of the male sex.  They all seemed to think that however much the practice of self-excitement might hurt a man, and all thought that it would hurt him, a woman might masturbate as often as she liked, failing better means of satisfaction, as she had no such loss of substance as a man.

Of the twenty-six normal women, whom I knew more intimately than I did the fifty-five prostitutes, thirteen, without being questioned by me, blurted out the fact that they were habitual masturbators, apparently all required to think of the loved person to obtain full satisfaction. Fellatio was proposed, and fully performed, by nine, of whom three experienced the orgasm as soon as they perceived that I had attained to it.  All were more or less excited while doing it.  One proposed anal coitus, “just to see what it was like;” and three proposed cunnilingus, one having been initiated by a girl friend, and one by her husband.  The third had, I believe, evolved the act out of her own inner consciousness in her desire to experience pleasure with me.  My relations with one of the twenty-six were confined to my masturbation of her, the while she did fellatio, as she said that she “had no feeling inside down there.”

With two exceptions my partings from these normal women have not been tragic and all whom I have met in after life (seven) have been very ready to resume relations with me, four of them having made the proposal themselves.

One thing has struck me, and that is the, often great, difference that exists between what a woman’s looks lead one to think she is, and what she is when one becomes her lover; the most sensual woman that I have met might have sat for her portrait as the Madonna, and she was the only one who took pleasure in hearing and relating “smoking-room stories,” a form of amusement which, perhaps from their want of appreciation of humor and wit, women do not indulge in—­at least in my experience.

    HISTORY V.—­(A continuation of History III in Appendix B to the
    previous volume.)

As I became better I commenced to dream of true love.  I wondered, too, if my horrible past really could be lived down and a young woman come to love me.  I took pleasure in reading love poems, especially Browning’s, and illustrated some with little water-colors....

I was sitting in the stalls one night seeing a performance by a company of English actors when one of them played so badly that I thought to myself:  “Why, hang it, I could play it better myself!” The next minute another