reveal the glistening pearliness of his teeth. Yet, though
deeming him the beautifulest youth in the world, I experienced no
sexual interest either in him or in the other boys, who indeed
were all beautiful--beauty was their chief asset. Dorian,
further, dilated on the splendor of his female attire, satin
corsets, low-cut evening gowns, etc., donned on gala nights to
display his gleaming shoulders and dimpled, plump, white arms.
Thus arrayed, he bantered, he would bewitch even me, now so
impassive, until I should throw myself, in tears of happiness,
into his loving embrace.

"My first venture upon _fellatio_ was a month later, with the
young surgeon. I confessed the whim to try it, and he acceded.
Though this nauseous and fatiguing act, very imperfectly
performed, was prompted mostly by curiosity, there arose soon a
passional hankering for repetition. In short, appetence for
_fellatio_ grew slowly from the night of that mawkish fiasco and
waxed eventually into a sovereign want.

"Perhaps miscarriage of that initiatory experiment was due to
precipitance, incubation of my perverse instinct being not yet
complete. A hiatus of a month now supervened, in which, while
further _fellatio_ was not attempted, my mind came always nearer
to a reconcilement with the grossness of the act, and began to
discover for its creatures some correlation in pretty boys beheld
in the flesh. One evening, in Broadway, I conceived suddenly a
full-fledged desire for a youth issuing from an hotel as I
passed. Our glances met and dwelled together. At a shop-window he
first accosted me. He was an invert. With him, in his room at the
hotel whence I had seen him emerge, I passed an apocalyptic
night. Thereafter commerce with boys only in the spirit ceased to
be an end; the images were carnalized, stepped from their
framework into the streets. That boy, that god out of the
machine, I see him clearly: his brown, curling hair; his eyes
blue as the sea; his chest both arched and so plump, his rounded
arms, his taper waist, the graceful swell of his hips and full,
snowy thighs; I recall as of yesterday the dimples in his knees,
the slenderness of his ankles, the softness of his little feet,
with insteps pink like the inside of a shell. How I gloated over
his ample roundness, his rich undulations!

"In