Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/163

 Brought before the Marylebone police-justice, was a certain Catherine Coome, aged sixty-six, dressed as a man. She was charged with obtaining money on false pretenses, in various small sums, from a woman in the same house where she was lodging. She had shared a room with a person of the other sex, without detection. For forty years, as it transpired, Catherine Coome aggressively had personated a man, with entire success; even to marrying a young woman in England. The defendant had been first married (as a woman) at about fifteen years of age. She well enough educated to take a post as a schoolmistress. When in Birmingham, she decided that she would personate a man henceforth, as she could "get on better so". She took up the trade of a painter and decorator, on board the Peninsular and Oriental Line steamers, and also was employed in London by several excellent West-End firms as a skilled decorator. She was also for two years at sea, in service as a head-cook, always in male disguise, on a steamer of the Line named. She gave that up, and after returning to England married a female servant in the family of Lady Campbell, at Hampton Court; and so lived for not less than fourteen years at Huddersfield. After this, circumstances brought her to London. Here she fell into poverty, had accidents, illnesses etc., and so was obliged to lead a precarious sort of life, even to being in a workhouse as a male pauper. The prisoner looked thoroughly masculine, and in voice and manner was so manlike that there was no wonder in her identity being unguessed. She was shrewd in her dishonesty, and availed herself of her education in such deceptions; but did not seem to be really of criminal preferences or lacking conscience. She had lived honestly as long as she could do so, it appeared.

Unfortunately the medical analysis of this case has not reached the writer, nor does he know how far there was organic abnormalism. But the wife in Huddersfield