Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/23

 I can offer myself on this occasion only as a finger-post to guide the reader along a road where shapes that will be startling mystic, beautiful, repulsive, tragic, commonplace, are continually to be seen. It is a highway of human-nature hourly traversed by millions, of all ranks; a road foot-worn, day by day, since humanity began. But the procession upon it is one extraordinarily, sternly reticent. Perhaps the very reader of these lines may long have been marching, or staggering, with the cortège, half-conscious of his companions far behind him, or at hand on the right or the left, or beyond him. Those who could unriddle the march to him are not likely to speak a word to him. Those who are willing to speak of one or another social or moral phase of the matter, particularly of the more obvious and vulgar aspects, are as a general rule, either insincere or wholly ignorant of the real psychology in what they discuss. And the reader may be the last person in his whole circle of friends to confess that he has a profound personal interest in the topic. Like the Spartan lad, with the gnawing fox hidden under his garment, he may have done nothing more instinctively and carefully, all his life long, than to try to hide from all interlocutors the anguish that is destroying his peace of mind and life.