Page:Autobiography of an Androgyne 1918 book scan.djvu/220

190 at a university. I repeat that throughout my carcer as a fairie— apart from the coquetry and venery just named—I lived up to the highest ethical standards, and never knowingly inflicted the least detriment on a single soul.

More than once before the opening of this second half of my open career, I had thought that my period of flirtation was at an end. Particularly on account of my age, having now entered my twenty-sixth year, I had thought no more romantic adventures could be mine. But it turned out that these six years, even the last of them, when I was thirty-one, were full of adventures as romantic as I had ever had.

When I dedicated myself to the career of a soldiers' mignon, I was well aware that these men are particularly subject to venereal disease—and I ultimately contracted anal and buccal venereal warts, syphilis, and gonorrhea from them, whereas during the first half of my career, I had had close to 700 liaisons with civilian adolescents without contracting any disease so far as I knew. But I gladly assumed this greatly increased risk because of the ultravirility and general terribleness of the class in question. This terribleness is applicable only to the professional common soldier when the nation is at peace.

I asked an unusually attractive artilleryman whom I met on the Bowery if I might visit him at his barracks, and one evening made the journey. I was conducted to his squad-room, but he was not in. I found myself in what was to me a sensual paradise containing about a dozen youthful soldiers busy at different things. I could not