Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/229

 And yet, until lately, they could not he torn entirely nut of his life. Most Uranists know why!"

"Still, they had been so expelled, finally. The turning-point had come with Karvaly. It. meant the story of the development of a swift, admiring- friendship from the younger soldier toward the older. But alas! this had gradually become a fierce, despairing homosexual love. This, at its height, had been as destructive of Imre's peace as it was hopeless. Of course, it was impossible of confession to its object. Karvaly was no narrow intellect; his affection for Imre was warm. But he would never have understood, not even as some sort of a diseased illusion, this sentiment in Imre. Much less would he have tolerated it for an instant. The inevitable rupture of their whole intimacy would have come with Imre's betrayal of his passion. So he had done wisely to hide every throb from Karvaly. How sharply Karvaly had on one occasion expressed himself on masculine homosexuality, Imre cited to me with other remembrances. At the time of the vague scandal about the ex-officer Clement, whom Imre and I had met, Imre had asked Karvaly, with a fine carelessness,—'Whether he; believed that there was any scientific excuse for such a sentiment?' Karvaly answered, with the harsh conviction of a dionistic temperament that has never so much as paused to think of the matter as a question in psychology … "If I found that you cared for another man that way, youngster, I should give you my best revolver, and tell you to but a bullet through your brains within an hour! Why, if I found that you thought of me so, I should brand you in the Officer's Casino tonight, and shoot you myself, at ten paces, tomorrow morning!… Men are not to live when they turn beasts … Oh, damn your doctors and scientists! A man's a man, and a woman's a woman! You can't mix up their emotions like that".

"The dread of Karvaly's detection, the struggle with himself to subdue passion, not merely to hide it, and along with these nerve-wearing solicitudes, the sense of what the suspicion of the world about him would inevitably bring on his head, had put Imre, little by little, into a sort of panic. He maintained an exaggerated attitude of safety that had wrought on him unluckily, in many a valuable social relation. He wore his mask each and every instant, resolving to make it his natural face before himself! Having, discovered, through intimacy with Karvaly, how a warm friendship on the part of the homosexual temperament, over and over takes to itself the complexion of homosexual love—the one emotion constantly likely to rise in the other and to blend itself inextricably into its alchemy—Imre had simply sworn to make no intimate