void of strong
affection; physically, a mild antagonism, the naked body of a man
was slightly repellant. Statues of women evoked both carnal and
esthetic response; of men, no emotions whatever, save a deepening
of that native antipathy. Similarly in paintings, in literature,
the drama, the men served but as foils for the delicious maidens,
who visited my aerial seraglios and lapped me in roseate
dreamings.

"In my eighteenth year we returned to America, where I entered
the university.

"The course of my love of women was now a little erratic; normal
connection began to lose fascination. As long ago I had
formulated untutored the _rationale_ of coitus, so now
imagination, groping in the dark, conceived a fresh fillip for
the appetite--_cunnilinctus_. But this, though for a while quite
adequate, soon ceased to gratify. At this juncture, Christmas of
my first college year, I was appointed editor of a small
magazine, an early stricture of whose new conduct was paucity of
love stories. Such improvident neglect was in keeping with my
altering view of women, a view accorded to me by self-dissipation
of the glamour through which they had been wont to appear. I had
wandered somehow behind the scenes, and beheld, no footlights of
sex intervening, the once so radiant fairies resolved into a
raddled humanity, as likable as ever, but desirable no longer.

"Soon after this the Oscar Wilde case was bruiting about. The
newspaper accounts of it, while illuminating, flashed upon me no
light of self-revelation; they only amended some idle conjectures
as to certain mystic vices I had heard whispered of. Here and
there a newspaper allusion still too recondite was painstakingly
clarified by an effeminate fellow-student, who, I fancy now,
would have shown no reluctance had I begged him to adduce
practical illustration. I purchased, too, photographs of Oscar
Wilde, scrutinizing them under the unctuous auspices of this same
emasculate and blandiloquent mentor. If my interest in Oscar
Wilde arose from any other emotion than the rather morbid
curiosity then almost universal, I was not conscious of it.

"Erotic dreams, precluded hitherto by coition, came now to beset
me. The persons of these dreams were (and still are) invariably
women, with this one remembered exception: I dreamed that Oscar