Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/161

 and satisfactory" to her husband. He was always travelling commercially; they had no settled home; she was wholly free from domestic life. For some time—during her first weeks of marriage—she lost much of her masculinity of tastes, and, forgot that she would rather be of the other sex. But this retrogression in feeling was wholly apart from the sexual effect on her of her new relationship; so she insists. Also the feelings of repugnance were returning, just when her husband suddenly died while they were in a Mexican city. This left her again to herself. She decided that she "would be a man now, for all and for good". Her relatives were so situated that she need not fear any obstacle or even interest from them. She assumed male attire. From the first, she has wholly deceived everybody, has travelled and lived in the United States, England and the Continent with perfect freedom, and never with detection; the more readily as she passes for a man of invalid constitution and suffers from asthma. She smokes, drinks light liquors temperately, plays billiards, rides horseback, fences, and goes into considerable general society all as a man, and undetected. She has a confidential lawyer who manages her property, which is considerable, and who does not disclose what he knows of her transformation. She went to Boston, and (rather nominally) resides there, because she had no acquaintances there to betray her sex, and there could start out in a new life as a man". She passes much time in England, with the man-woman friend indicated. I have not mentioned that the patient is forty-seven years old, though looking younger; an only child".

The vita sexualis of "Mr. Z—," is completely homosexual, the marriage-episode having made no change in it. As a young child, she was passionately interested in exclusively female beauty, dreamed of sleeping with women, sexually, at an early age, and had no sense of the opposite sex. When in school, she had intense friendships, and was