world will not agree with me on that
point.

One thing strikes me as remarkable now: the audacity with which I went
to a baudy house; all the rest seems to have began, and followed as
naturally as possible. What a lovely recollection it is! nothing in my
career since is so lovely as our life then was; scarce a trace of what
may be called lasciviousness was in it, had the priest blest it by the
bands of matrimony, it would have been called the chaste pleasure of
love and affection--as the priest had nothing to do with it, it will
be called I suppose beastly immorality. I have often wondered if her
husband found out that she was not a virgin, and if not whether it was
owing to some skill of hers, or to his ignorance; I heard afterwards
that they lived happily.

CHAPTER VI.

Mary the cook.--A bloody nose and broken piss-pot.--An
involuntary spend.--A feel and a poke.--A new sensation.--At
a baudy house.--Mary's history.--She leaves.

As the certainty that all was finished between us came to me, I
got better, my grief moderated, my prick expected occupation, I was
horrified at having frigged myself, and ceased doing it. Then naturally
I looked at the servants. The new housemaid was ugly as sin, so I turned
to Mary the cook. I was then about seventeen years old.

She was now I think twenty-six or eight years old, big, stout, but as it
seemed to me then, symmetrical; she had exquisite teeth, blue eyes, and a
fine complexion--so fine that my mother remarked it. She was quiet in
a remarkable degree, and treated me as a boy. Nine months before this
I should as soon have dared to think of fucking my aunt, but experience
had altered me. I thought of the light hair on her cunt, and of all I
could not see, which Charlotte had innocently described to me; and the
conclusions we had arrived at, that she frigged herself. Then I thought
that after all, old as she was, and young as I was, she might like
Charlotte, let me do her. I had once kissed her when Charlotte was with
us, and she had taken it as if she was letting a child kiss her; I now
tried it again, and got a quiet kiss in return; it was done with the air
and manner of "There, there, you troublesome boy," which mortified me
much.

I had now special tutors at home, and was at home when I liked, yet
my chances with the cook were fewer than they had been with Charlotte,
owing to her occupations. I was studying elementary chemistry, and when
making some