Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/385

 is thought the last sort for circulating among British boys, and girls. A pathetic story "Tim" (mentioned in the seventh chapter of this book) a direct and specialistic study of 'psychic homosexuality' in two school-lads—one of them wholly intersexual in type—is nevertheless to be classed in the library for young Britons. The authourship of this little tale remains anonymous. Another juvenile, "The French Prisoners" by Edward Bertz, better-known by his active career in German belles-lettres, has a subtle note of the psychologic kind in question, in its emotional development. A recent story of Harrow school-life, "The Hill", by Horace Vachell (a book exceptional in its crowded field, for its vividness of characterizations, manly moral uplift and charm of style) offers even more than "Tim" the ingredient of an absolutely absorbing "passion of friendship", a self-forgetting devotion and intense admiration on the part of one lad for another—the 'god of his idolatry." A kind of mystic struggle, of which jealousy is a factor, against the evil charm of a third scholmateschoolmate [sic]—the beautiful and conscienceless "Demon", as he is nick-named—enters into the the story. It has no hint (in fact a passing incident is particularly to the contrary) of physical emotionalism. But almost first and last it is suggestive of the key of sub-conscious youthful uranianism. No other emotional factor in the book is on the same plane of elaboration and import. Also in "White Cockades" a little tale of the flight of the Younger Pretender, by E. I. Stevenson, issued in Edinburgh some years ago, passionate devotion from a rustic youth toward the Prince, and its recognition are half-hinted as homosexual in essence. The sentiment of uranian adolescence is more distinguishable in another book for lads, "Philip-and Gerald", by the same hand; a romantic story in which a youth in his latter teens is irresistibly attracted to a much younger lad: and becomes, con amore, responsible for the latter's personal safety, in a series of unexpected events that throw them