heir natures.
But I discovered that I possessed the power of inventing women who,
while they only dimly resembled the neighbours, and acquired a few
traits from the illustrations in books, were none the less
extraordinarily real, becoming clearly visualized, living in my
thoughts, drawing sustenance from secret sources, and inspiring me with
a suspicion, never reaching expression, that they were really aspects of
myself--what I would have been if, as I sometimes heard near relatives
regret, I had been born a girl. And later, when I was a youth, and began
to go out into the world, all those vague imaginings crystallized into a
definite conception. She was everything I disliked--a tiny, slender
creature with pale golden hair and pathetic blue eyes, and in my dreams
she was always clinging to me, which I detested. I regarded myself with
contempt for remaining preoccupied with a fancy so alien to my
temperament. You might suppose that an image inspiring such antagonism
would soon fade. On the contrary, she assumed a larger and larger
dominion over my imagination. I fancied myself married to her, and for
days the spell of such a dire destiny made me ill. It was summer time,
and I lived on the upper floor of my mother's house in an outlying
_faubourg_ of London, from the windows of which one could look across a
wide wooded valley or down into the secluded gardens of the surrounding
villas. And one evening I happened to look down and I saw, between the
thickly clothed branches of the lime-trees, the woman of my dreams
sitting in a neighbour's garden, nursing a baby, and rocking herself to
and fro while she turned her childish features and pale blue eyes toward
the house with an expectant smile. I sat at my window looking at this
woman, some neighbour's recently married daughter no doubt, my thoughts
in a flurry of fear, for she was just as I had imagined her. I wonder if
I can make you understand that I did not want to imagine her at all,
that I was helpless in the grip of my forebodings? For in the dream it
was I who would come out of the drawing-room door on to the lawn, who
would advance in an alpaca coat, put on after my return from business, a
gold watch-chain stretched athwart my stomach, carpet slippers on my
soft, untravelled feet, and would bend down to that clinging form....

As I have told you, it was about that time that I left the _faubourgs_
and went to live in a studio among artists. Without knowing it, I took
t