these questions before and found an answer. Now they came again
with a trail of fresh implications and I had no answer for them at
all. As I approached Nettie she ceased to be the mere butt of my
egotistical self-projection, the custodian of my sexual pride, and
drew together and became over and above this a personality of her
own, a personality and a mystery, a sphinx I had evaded only to
meet again.

I find a little difficulty in describing the quality of the old-world
love-making so that it may be understandable now.

We young people had practically no preparation at all for the stir
and emotions of adolescence. Towards the young the world maintained
a conspiracy of stimulating silences. There came no initiation.
There were books, stories of a curiously conventional kind that
insisted on certain qualities in every love affair and greatly
intensified one's natural desire for them, perfect trust, perfect
loyalty, lifelong devotion. Much of the complex essentials of
love were altogether hidden. One read these things, got accidental
glimpses of this and that, wondered and forgot, and so one grew.
Then strange emotions, novel alarming desires, dreams strangely
charged with feeling; an inexplicable impulse of self-abandonment
began to tickle queerly amongst the familiar purely egotistical
and materialistic things of boyhood and girlhood. We were like
misguided travelers who had camped in the dry bed of a tropical
river. Presently we were knee deep and neck deep in the flood.
Our beings were suddenly going out from ourselves seeking other
beings--we knew not why. This novel craving for abandonment to
some one of the other sex, bore us away. We were ashamed and full
of desire. We kept the thing a guilty secret, and were resolved to