ng like it." These sensations,
it should be added, have continued into adult life. "I always
experience them just before menstruation, and afterward for a few
days, and, occasionally, though it seems to me not so often,
during the period itself. I may have the sensation four or five
times during the day; it is not dependent at all upon external
impressions, or my own thoughts, and is sometimes absent for days
together. It is just one flash, as if you would snap your
fingers, and it is over."

As a child, she was, of course, quite unconscious that there was
anything sexual in these sensations. They were then usually
associated with various imaginary scenes. The one usually
indulged in was that a black bear was waiting for her up in a
tree, and that she was slowly raised up toward the bear by means
of ropes and then lowered again, and raised, feeling afraid of
being caught by the bear, and yet having a morbid desire to be
caught. In after years she realized that there was a physical
sexual cause underlying these imaginations, and that what she
liked was a feeling of resistance to the bear giving rise to the
physical sensation.

At a somewhat later age, though while still a child, she
cherished an ideal passion for a person very much older than
herself, this passion absorbing her thoughts for a period of two
years, during which, however, there was no progress made in
physical sensation. It was when she was nearly thirteen years of
age, soon after the appearance of menstruation, and under the
influence of this ideal passion, that she first learned to
experience conscious orgasm, which was not associated with the
thought of any person. "I did not associate it with anything high
or beautiful, owing to the fact that I had imbibed our current
ideas in regard to sexual feelings, and viewed them in a very
poor light indeed." She considers that her sexual feelings were
stronger at this period than at any other time in her life. She
could, however, often deny herself physical satisfaction for
weeks at a time, in order that she might not feel unworthy of the
object of her ideal passion. "As for the sexual satisfaction,"
she writes, "it was experimental. I had heard older girls speak
of the pleasure of such feelings, but I was not taught anything
by example, or otherwise. I merely