il 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, 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 exist