Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/113

 work as usual and to be active in lively society. Pressently [sic] he broke down completely in nerves, became sleepless and was ill in bed for weeks, the excuse being prostration from overwork. The matter told on him desperately. He went to a sanitarium. While there he attempted suicide, but failed because a drug was too weak. At last by extreme efforts toward self-control, he pulled himself together, the musician having gone back to Europe, and the sense of the rupture being somewhat dulled. R— resumed his work and social life. He says that, so far as he knows, only one person, that one person being an elderly (married) lady with whom he has always had a specially warm and sympathetic friendship, suspects the nature of his nervous break".

"This affair is relatively recent. R— is not by any means "well" of it. Between hatred of his nature, disgust at life and dread of (as he frankly says) not only the past but the future, as well as through his too uncertain ideas as to his nature, he made up his mind to ascertain what a nervous specialist would make of his "case"; would give as advice, toward getting rid of it—if it could be got rid of at all".

"R—, as intimated, has played perfectly his rôle in outward life as a man. He takes assiduous part in all sexual talk about women, and is in such intimate relations with two or three of them that what is only an intellectual relation is supposed to be sexual. He has been urged to marry; by many friends. He would marry if he were not now certain that there would be no sexual help in the tie. He fears marriage would only be a melancholy error, bringing great disappointment and worse. Several times he has had reason to know that he has been loved by women whom he would have been glad to marry "if marriage were only an intellectual bond" in its duties and expectations. The horror feminis is too intense now