to carry the parental advice to the logical
conclusion. I tried a licensed house. The place was clean and
decent, and the conditions, I take it, such as one would normally
find in any properly regulated continental city; but to me the
whole thing appeared unspeakably horrible. It was a purely
commercial transaction, and it had not even the redeeming element
of risk to one's self, or of offense against a social or
disciplinary code. I came away feeling that I had touched bottom
in my sexual experiences, and I understood what it was that Faust
saw when the red mouse sprang from the mouth of the witch in the
Walpurgis dance.

"These were the only occasions upon which I have had sexual
intercourse with women. Looking back to them now, they appear to
me to have been almost inevitable; but if I had my life over
again I would shun them as I would a lethal draught. I believe I
came out of the fire unscathed; probably, indeed, it did me good,
in the sense that it made it possible for me to look deeper into
life; though to what extent seeing the torments of the damned
makes us do this, perhaps only a Dante could tell. To gain
knowledge at the expense of the shame and misery of others I hold
to be fundamentally wrong and immoral. What is to me, however,
the chief and bitterest thought is that I flung away the first
spring of manhood where I got no love in return. His virginity
is, or should be, as glorious and sacred a possession to a youth
as to a maiden; to be guarded jealously; to be given only at the
call of love, to one who loves him--be it comrade, mistress, or
wife--and whom he can love in return.

"The full university life into which I now entered at the age of
20 brought with it a flood of new ideas, feelings and sensations.
The friendships I made there will always remain the central ones
in my life. Up to my last term at college at the age of 24 I
still wore my chain-mail of artificial chastity; but then a
change gradually set in, and I began to understand the
relationship of the physical phenomena of sex to its intellectual
and imaginative manifestations. (I was not destined to fully
realize this for some years and then exclusively through and out
of my own personal experience.) It was the study of Walt
Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_ that first brought me light upon this