Of course the case of Maurice Kirkwood is a remarkable and exceptional one, and it is hardly probable that any reader’s experience will furnish him with its parallel.  But let him look back over all his acquaintances, if he has reached middle life, and see if he cannot recall more than one who, for some reason or other, shunned the society of young women, as if they had a deadly fear of their company.  If he remembers any such, he can understand the simple statements and natural reflections which are laid before him.

One of the most singular facts connected with the history of Maurice Kirkwood was the philosophical equanimity with which he submitted to the fate which had fallen upon him.  He did not choose to be pumped by the Interviewer, who would show him up in the sensational columns of his prying newspaper.  He lived chiefly by himself, as the easiest mode of avoiding those meetings to which he would be exposed in almost every society into which he might venture.  But he had learned to look upon himself very much as he would upon an intimate not himself,—­upon a different personality.  A young man will naturally enough be ashamed of his shyness.  It is something which others believe, and perhaps he himself thinks, he might overcome.  But in the case of Maurice Kirkwood there was no room for doubt as to the reality and gravity of the long enduring effects of his first convulsive terror.  He had accepted the fact as he would have accepted the calamity of losing his sight or his hearing.  When he was questioned by the experts to whom his case was submitted, he told them all that he knew about it almost without a sign of emotion.  Nature was so peremptory with him,—­saying in language that had no double meaning:  “If you violate the condition on which you hold my gift of existence I slay you on the spot,”—­that he became as decisive in his obedience as she was in her command, and accepted his fate without repining.

Yet it must not be thought for a moment,—­it cannot be supposed,—­that he was insensible because he looked upon himself with the coolness of an enforced philosophy.  He bore his burden manfully, hard as it was to live under it, for he lived, as we have seen, in hope.  The thought of throwing it off with his life, as too grievous to be borne, was familiar to his lonely hours, but he rejected it as unworthy of his manhood.  How he had speculated and dreamed about it is plain enough from the paper the reader may remember on Ocean, River, and Lake.

With these preliminary hints the paper promised is submitted to such as may find any interest in them.

Account of A case of Gynophobia.

With remarks.

Being the Substance of a Report to the Royal Academy of the Biological Sciences by a Committee of that Institution.