Page:Autobiography of an Androgyne 1918 book scan.djvu/192

162 I was thunderstruck. It was the only time I have ever been recognized by a paramour of the slums in a quarter of the city distant from our place of meeting. I now enumerate my encounters with acquaintances of the one life while living out the other side of my double life.

Three where I was not recognized: I meet face to face a policeman on Broadway who was my very first companion at the opening of my life as a fairie ("Red Mike"). While secretary to a millionaire in the suburbs, I rode twelve miles in the same car with two Mulberry Street companions with whom I had passed many evenings. I would not allow them to see my face. A soldier with whom I, as Jennie June, became acquainted at a fort, came near, ten years previously, being a member of my Sunday school class. (I wish to remind the reader that I engaged in no religious work while yielding to the procreative " instincts. I have always considered such a combination scandalous. Inverts, while committing no sin in following their instincts in moderation, should leave church work absolutely alone unless they are able to crucify their carnal desire.) I myself recognized the soldier only after learning his name, and that he came from my own native village. I of course did not let him know that we once attended the same church.

Two of my Stuyvesant Square friends once greeted me in a store, and another on a street car. In a large city several hundred miles from New York, I was greeted by an actor friend of my Fourteenth Street days. Three different times in cities several hundred miles from New York