. My first sexually tinged dream
was of her--that while she stood near I impinged my penis upon a
red-hot anvil and then, in beatific self-immolation, exhibited
the charred stump to her wondering, round eyes. This love,
however, abated at the coming of a new girl to the school, who,
not more beautiful, but more buxom, made stronger appeal to my
nascent sexuality. One afternoon, in the loft of her father's
stable, she induced me to disrobe, herself setting the example.
The erection our mutual handlings produced on me was without
conscious impulse; I felt only a childish curiosity on beholding
our genital difference. But the episode started extravagant
whimsies, one of which persistently obsessed me: with these
obviously compensatory differences, why might not the girl and I
effect some sort of copulation? This fantasy, drawn exclusively
from that unique experience, charmed with its grotesqueness only,
for at that time my sense of sex was but inchoate and my
knowledge of it was nothing. The bizarre conceit, submitted to
the equally ignorant girl and approved, was borne to the paternal
hay-loft and there, with much bungling, brought to surprising and
pleasurable consummation.

"In the four ensuing years I repeated the act not seldom with
this girl and with others.

"When I was 11 my sister and I were taken by our parents to
Europe, where we remained six years, attending school each winter
in a different city and, during the summer, travelling in various
countries.

"Abroad my lust was glutted to the full: the amenable
girl-playmate was ubiquitous, whom I plied with ardor at Swiss
hotels, German watering-places, French pensions,--where not?
Toward puberty I first repaired at times to prostitutes.

"Masturbation, excepting a few experiments, I never resorted to.
Few of my schoolmates avowedly practised it.

"Of homosexuality my sole hearing was through the classics,
where, with no long pondering, I opined it merely our modern
comradery, poetically aggrandized, masquerading in antique
habiliments and phraseology. It never came home to me; it attuned
to no tone in the scale of my sympathies; I possessed no
touchstone for transmitting the recitals of those ambiguous
amours into fiery messages. The relation to my own sex was,
intellectually, an occasional friendship de