e ideal was totally
absent, and the part I played was passive rather than active. I
was put to sleep with a boy considerably my senior. His
initiation led to a physical familiarity between us which was not
warm or kind, and I was allowed no scope for my own instinctive
desires for a warmer kind of contact; if I sought it under cover
of my companion's slumbers I found myself kicked away. Only on
one occasion did I find a few moments of supreme charm, while his
sleep remained sound, by discovering in the recesses of the sheet
an exposed surface of flesh against which I pressed my face in an
abandonment of joy. For the rest I was a passive participant, his
pleasure seeming to end in the mere handling of the fleshy
portions of my body. For this purpose I usually lay face downward
across his knees. So far as I can remember, this intimacy led to
a decrease in my pursuit of imaginative pleasures; for about a
year no further development took place.

"At about this date I was circumcised on account of the prepuce
being too long.

"Between the 6th and 7th years a change of environment brought me
into contact with a new set of faces. I had then a bed to myself,
and once more my imagination awoke to life. It was at this time
that I found myself constructing from men's faces suppositions as
to the rest of their bodies: a brown face led me to suppose a
uniformly brown body, a pale face a pale body. This idea of
variety began to charm me. I now made definite choice in my
reveries whether I would go to sleep between white thighs, or red
thighs, or brown thighs. Going to sleep definitely describes the
goal of the method to which I had addicted myself. As soon as I
entered my bed I abandoned myself to the construction of an amour
and retained it as long as I had consciousness. I may say that I
was not conscious of any emissions under these circumstances
(until some years later, when I brought it about by my own act),
but the pleasure was fairly acute.

"All this time there were secret meetings, with my bedfellow of
the year before. But they now took place by day, in various
hiding-places, with little unclothing or exposure, and my
companion was cold and fastidious and repelled any warmth on my
part; it became to me a dry sort of ritual. I had an idea at that
time that the whole thing