I had been allowed to prolong my embrace and to act, indeed, upon my full instincts.  Once more I felt suddenly the coming of something acutely impending; I took my courage in my hands and went boldly forward.  In another moment I had hold of the mysterious secret of masculine energy, to which all my years of dilirious imaginings had been but as a waiting at the threshold, the knocking on a closed door.

“It was inevitable that from that day our intimacy should dwindle into dissolution (though other causes anticipated this natural decay), but I no longer found masturbation a dry and wearisome formula.  In my novitiate I was disheartened to find how long it took me to dissociate myself from the contemplative and attach myself to the active form of self-gratification.  But I presently found myself committed to the repetition of the act three times a day.  On almost the last occasion I met my intimate he showed an exceptional ardor.  At that meeting he proposed to attempt an act I had not previously considered possible, far less had I heard that it was considered the worst criminal connection that could take place.  I had a slight fear of pain, but was willing to gratify him, and for the first time found in my submission a union of the two amative instincts which had before disputed sway in me:  the instinct for tenderness and the instinct for cruelty. Pedicatio failed to take place, but I received an embrace which for the first time gave me full satisfaction.  My delight was enormous; I was filled with emotions.  I have no words to describe the extraordinary charm of the warm, smooth flesh upon mine, and the rougher contact of the hairy parts.  Yet I was conscious, even at the time, that this was but the physical side of pleasure, and that he was not and never could be one whom I might truly be said to love.

“I was now in my sixteenth year, and under the influence of these and many other emotions then, for the first time, beginning to seize me, a sense of literary power and a desire to express myself through imaginative channels began to take hold of me.  I feared that my indulgence was having an enfeebling power on my faculties (I had begun to experience physical languor and depression), and certain religious scruples, the result of my early training, took hold of me.  For the first time I became conscious that the ardors I felt toward my own sex were a diversion of the sex-instinct itself, and to my astonishment and consternation I found by chance the practices I had already indulged in definitely denounced in the Bible as an abomination.  From that moment began a struggle which lasted for years.  I made a final breach with my former intimate, and thereupon a long dispute took place between the conflicting influences that strove for possession of my body.  For a time I broke off the habit of masturbation, but I could not so easily rid myself of the mental indulgence, which was now almost an essential sedative for inducing