Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/422

 one can properly include the famous Mary Somerville as at all uraniad, save by her vigorous mind for the abstract.

Suggestive friendships of uraniad force and constancy are many among women of the intersexual type. In numerous cases their literary records are striking. Thus we remember from youth, the history of the famous "Two Ladies of Langollen", whose romantic retreat to a rural life, in the end of the eighteenth century, was so remarked. A biographical record of a long relationship, that seems to have has a strongly psychic uranianism, an an intersexual. quality in it, came a few years ago from an American lady, Miss A. C. Wood, in a volume "The Story Of A Friendship"; sketching the personality and life of Miss Irene Leache, a Virginian lady with whom Miss Wood had been intimately associated for more than thirty years. Their companionship was of exceptional closeness, excluding approach of any counter-sentiment to interrupt its, passional quality. Miss Leache had a nature of classic breadth and depth in its acceptances; was mystic, perceptive by intuition and virile; was, in fact, one of those magnetic types whose educative currents of mind impress themselves on even casual acquaintances. Her outward type—judging from her portrait—was equally of classic suggestiveness in the gentle gravity of the countenance, the philosophic repose of features, and the profound eyes.

The literature of Uraniadism, whether due to uraniad authours or quite impersonal as a study, including a large number of books by male writers, is a large aggregate. Much of it (indeed most of it) is in French, and by Frenchmen or Frenchwomen. By far the greater part of it depicts whatever is vitiating, grossly sexual, neurotic, "realistically physical and repulsive. Hundreds of novels have the feminosexual instinct as their theme, but to call them "literature" is a politeness. Two studies—so to say—presenting typical aspects, with more or less