Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/105

 "understand how a man can fall in love with another man". Particularly, as one invaluable sham, must he take pains to appear sexually interested in women, to be intimate with women, to seem to relish open, and frequently obscene, sexual talk about women. This last is much in his programme for hiding sexual indifference or downright physical aversion to women. The Mask, ever the Mask! It becomes like the natural face of the wearer.

What this "masking" of his real self is to any Uranian temperament naturally expansive, emotional, unfriendly to checks, one can imagine. It is astonishing that it is so successfully worn, sometimes all through life. It begets in the uranistic type that bitter humour, ironic wit, self-mockery, that are often so entertaining to those who do not know what is covered.

The "normal" man is likely to be drawn specially and even tenderly to Uranians of the finer individuality. He is even won to the rather feminine types, as a friend; unaware or the subtle intersexual magnetism. It is very often precisely the hidden femininity of psychos in the Uranian that wins the virile Dionian. The Dionian friend is unabfe to explain why his feeling for the Uranian is so sentimental, so tender. Deep and lasting dionian friendships with Uranians are many; whether the Dionian "understands" them or not. And although often the dionian friend, when some unguarded moment or false hope betrays the secret, turns in horror and disgust from the Uranian, this is not always the end. Often the friendship survives the psychologic shock. "I cannot understand what you confess to me! I never shall understand it! I shudder at it!" sometimes exclaims the Dionian in such an hour, "but I cannot break our friendship! Let us never speak of that again! Help me to forget it. Let us go on as if that never had been