Page:Autobiography of an Androgyne 1918 book scan.djvu/188

158 camel's back. I was at last rendered unable to be on my feet owing to spinal trouble, and to excruciating pain in the anus whenever I attempted to walk. I was compelled to enter a hospital.

For several years following, cleanliness required me gerere pannum perpetuo intra subuculam causa incontinentiae defecationis. But it was of little account, by no means rendering me what Beza would denominate "a stinking androgyne." The liquid excretion did not at all interfere with my pursuits of the scholar or the femaleimpersonator. As I must keep everything secret, I took upon myself the entire care of the cloths m my room. After a few years, the sphincter again functioned completely.

When able to leave the hospital, I felt satiated for life with coitus, and exceedingly homesick. I yielded to the temptation to find shelter under the parental roof. On my arrival home, which I had hardly expected to see again, I could do nothing but weep for the first half hour, and it was several hours before I could speak without bursting into tears. My mother enfolded her "little innocent boy," and my father had softened. Of course I never gave a true account of our period of estrangement.

I now believed that my career as a fairie was over. My early religious enthusiasm was renewed, and I began to spend a large part of my time in related studies. As already made known, I had had the career of a foreign missionary in mind from childhood up to the age of nineteen, and before many weeks I felt that now I was loosed from that terrible obsession by the "procreative" side of