er than before;
as our affections increased, so our fear of them increased also.
The friendship was too ethereal to live; but even yet we still
have a deep respect for one another.

"When at the age of 19 I left school I was allowed to knock about
for a year before entering college. During this time I picked up
a sexual experience that may or may not have been a valuable one,
I certainly look back upon it now, with regret, if not with
horror. My father had discovered, some months before this date,
that I was in the habit of masturbating, and he gave me what he
conceived to be the right counsel under the circumstances: 'If
you do this,' he said, 'you will never be able to use your penis
with a woman. Therefore your best plan will be to go with a
prostitute. Should you do this, however, you will probably pick
up a beastly disease. Therefore the safest way would be to do it
abroad if you get the chance, for there the houses are licensed.'
Having delivered himself of this advice he troubled himself no
further in the matter, but left me to work out my own destiny.
The great physician, to whom I was taken about this time, also
gave me his advice on this point. 'Masturbation,' he said, 'is
death. A number of young men come to me with the same story. I
tell them they are killing themselves, and you will kill
yourself, too.' The doctor's hope was apparently to frighten his
young patients into what he conceived to be natural conditions of
life, and one went away from him with the impression that every
sexual manifestation in one's self was a physical infirmity, due
to one's own moral weakness. It took me some time before I could
make up my mind to follow my father's advice, but after a period
of real moral agony I deliberately and entirely in cold blood
acted upon it. I sought out a scarlet woman in the streets of
---- and went home with her. From something she said to me I know
that I gave her pleasure, and she asked me to come to her again.
This I did twice, but without any real pleasure. The whole thing
was too sordid and soulless, and the man who decides to take an
evil medicine regularly has first to make up his mind that he
really needs it.

"At about the same time I chanced to be, for a few months, in a
German university town, and I determined, as I had the
opportunity,