Why should not I
overcome this dread of woman as Peter the Great fought down his dread of
wheels rolling over a bridge? Was I, alone of all mankind, to be doomed
to perpetual exclusion from the society which, as it seemed to me, was
all that rendered existence worth the trouble and fatigue of slavery to
the vulgar need of supplying the waste of the system and working at the
task of respiration like the daughters of Danaus,--toiling day and night
as the worn-out sailor labors at the pump of his sinking vessel?

Why did I not brave the risk of meeting squarely, and without regard to
any possible danger, some one of those fair maidens whose far-off smile,
whose graceful movements, at once attracted and agitated me? I can only
answer this question to the satisfaction of any really inquiring reader
by giving him the true interpretation of the singular phenomenon of
which I was the subject. For this I shall have to refer to a paper of
which I have made a copy, and which will be found included with
this manuscript. It is enough to say here, without entering into the
explanation of the fact, which will be found simple enough as seen
by the light of modern physiological science, that the "nervous
disturbance" which the presence of a woman in the flower of her
age produced in my system was a sense of impending death, sudden,
overwhelming, unconquerable, appalling. It was a reversed action of the
nervous centres,--the opposite of that which flushes the young lover's
cheek and hurries his bounding pulses as he comes into the presence of
the object of his passion. No one who has ever felt the sensation can
have failed to recognize it as an imperative summons, which commands
instant and terrified submission.

It was at this period of my life that my father determined to try the
effect of travel and residence in different localities upon my bodily
and mental condition. I say bodily as well as mental, for I was too
slender for my height and subject to some nervous symptoms which were a
cause of anxiety. That the mind was largely concerned in these there
was no doubt, but the mutual interactions of mind and body are often
too complex to admit of satisfactory analysis. Each is in part cause and
each also in part effect.

We passed some years in Italy, chiefly in Rome, where I was placed in a
school conducted by priests, and where of course I met only those of
my own sex. There I had the opportunity of seeing the influences under
which