ired for this process, when I attempted to imitate it,
disconcerted my thoughts and interfered with concentration on my
own inventions. I had never experienced the pleasure accompanying
the spasm of emission, and there seemed to be nothing worth
trying for along that road. I desisted and returned to my
reveries. I was now in a perfect maze of promiscuity; there must
have been at least fifty people who attracted me at that time. I
developed a liking for imagining myself between two lovers,
generally men who were physical contrasts. It was my habit to
analyze as minutely as possible those who attracted me. To gain
intimacy with what was below the surface I studied with attention
their hands, the wrists where they disappeared (showing the hair
of the forearm), and the neck; I estimated the comparative size
of the generative organs, the formation of the thighs and
buttocks, and thus constructed a presentment of the whole man.
The more vividly I could do this, the keener was the pleasure I
was able to obtain from their contemplated embraces.

"Till now I had been absolutely untouched by any moral scruples.
I had the usual acquiescence in the religious beliefs in which I
had been trained; it did not enter my head that there was any
divine law, one way or the other, concerning the allurements of
the imagination. From my thirteenth year slight hints of
uneasiness began to creep into my conscience. I began perhaps to
understand that the formulas of religion, to which I had listened
all my life with as little attention as possible, had some
meaning which now and then touched the circumstances of my own
life. I had not yet realized that my past foretold my future, and
that women would be to me a repulsion instead of an attraction
where things sexual were concerned. I had the full conviction
that one day I should be married; I had also some fear that as I
grew to manhood I might succumb to the temptations of loose
women. I had an incipient revulsion from such a fate, and this
seemed to me to indicate that moral stirrings were at work within
me. One night I was amorously attacked in my bedroom by two of
the domestics. I experienced an acute horror which I hid under
laughter; my resistance was so desperate that I escaped with a
tickling. I had been accustomed to sit on the servants' knees, a