nto
its warm and potently vitalized atmosphere? So it did indeed seem. The
dangerous experiment could not be repeated indefinitely. It was not
intentionally tried again, but accident brought about more than
one renewal of it during the following years, until it became fully
recognized that I was the unhappy subject of a mortal dread of
woman,--not absolutely of the human female, for I had no fear of my
old nurse or of my grandmother, or of any old wrinkled face, and I had
become accustomed to the occasional meeting of a little girl or two,
whom I nevertheless regarded with a certain ill-defined feeling that
there was danger in their presence. I was sent to a boys' school very
early, and during the first ten or twelve years of my life I had rarely
any occasion to be reminded of my strange idiosyncrasy.

As I grew out of boyhood into youth, a change came over the feelings
which had so long held complete possession of me. This was what my
father and his advisers had always anticipated, and was the ground of
their confident hope in my return to natural conditions before I should
have grown to mature manhood.

How shall I describe the conflicts of those dreamy, bewildering,
dreadful years? Visions of loveliness haunted me sleeping and waking.
Sometimes a graceful girlish figure would so draw my eyes towards it
that I lost sight of all else, and was ready to forget all my fears
and find myself at her side, like other youths by the side of young
maidens,--happy in their cheerful companionship, while I,--I, under
the curse of one blighting moment, looked on, hopeless. Sometimes the
glimpse of a fair face or the tone of a sweet voice stirred within
me all the instincts that make the morning of life beautiful to
adolescence. I reasoned with myself:

Why should I not have outgrown that idle apprehension which had been the
nightmare of my earlier years? Why should not the rising tide of life
have drowned out the feeble growths that infested the shallows of
childhood? How many children there are who tremble at being left alone
in the dark, but who, a few years later, will smile at their foolish
terrors and brave all the ghosts of a haunted chamber! Why should I any
longer be the slave of a foolish fancy that has grown into a half insane
habit of mind? I was familiarly acquainted with all the stories of the
strange antipathies and invincible repugnances to which others, some of
them famous men, had been subject. I said to myself,