fits.  A. was always crying until Miss T. went away with her pretty friend.  I knew nothing, could hardly be said to suspect anything definite, and yet I pitied that pretty girl whose eyes looked so helpless and appealing.

I set to work again.  But I continued to live on fruit and bread, and taking off my clothes I would stand up at the window in the sun.  A lot of prostitutes, however, who lived at the back saw me and were scandalized or shocked or thought me mad.  The landlady heard of it and spoke to A. So I had to desist from my glorious sun-baths.

We slept on a single bed, and though I did my best to avoid coitus (I wanted to wait and think out some theory of it), A., who knew nothing of this, wanted to resume our old habits, and finally I surrendered.  But my sufferings next day were intense, and I had the sense of having fallen from some high estate.  My thoughts were divided between two theories:  one that our misery was caused by our diet, more or less; the other that we had fallen into some error as regards coitus, and this was becoming almost a certainty with me.

There is one incident I think worthy of note which happened before the “fall” just mentioned and when I was living on fruit and in splendid health.  At a performance I saw a girl on the stage with handsome legs in tights, and once as she straightened her leg the knee-cap going into position gave me such a strange and keen joy—­of that quality I call divine or musical—­that I was like one suddenly awakened to the divinity and beauty of the female form.  The joy was so keen and yet peaceful, familiar, and subjective that I could not help comparing it to a happy chemical change in the tissues of my own brain.  Like the unexpected functioning of my skin in the sun it was a sign of a partial return to a normal condition, another glimpse of Paradise.

I stuck to my new diet and gained a fresh elation and joy in life.  Gradually clothes became insupportable, and I went down to the beach as often as possible to take them off, and at nights, beside the patient and astonished A., I would lie naked.  One evening, passing some grass, I looked over the fence like a gipsy and felt a longing to take off my clothes and sleep in the grass all night.  It was of course impossible.  And A. looked unhappily in my face; she began to think her mother, who now thought I was mad, must be right.

That night I woke up and found myself having coition.  I was angry and felt I had been put back in my progress, but a fever of lust now came over me.  I would sit under the tap and let the cold water run over me to conquer the fever, but at the end of a week my hopes were frustrated and I even turned against my natural diet, on which I had made flesh.  A., as I expected, went through her usual fits, and slowly recovered. (If we had connection only once she in about three weeks had a mild attack of fits; if we had coition