Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/48

 one man merely crosses the pathway of the other. A few words, a few glances—and lo, relations perhaps mutually in a perfect balance or perhaps quite unequal, but affecting henceforth whatever are life and character for each, or for one the two men, spring into irresistible activity. Scarcely yet quite aware of each other's existence and Ego, a mutuality still unreasoned-out, a flower of passion, vague or absolute, germinated and ripened like the Hindoo juggler's mango-tree illusion, such an emotion crystallizes to one of the most beautiful psychologic situation that human nature experiences. This suddenness, of friendship, as a thing illogical as sudden love, is an every-day phenomenon. The men concerned in it are of every class and type. The same conditions of mystery in such processes apply, of course, to many sudden, intimate friendships between women.

The word "passionate" was written a moment ago, in speaking of the intenser and more concentrated ardours of male homosexual friendships. With that quality we reach what sharply engages the attention of the explorer into psychology of the affections. For, ever and ever again, in these warm, profound, apparently normal homosexual friendships, can be divined, or else is outspoken, the relative incapability of any woman to be an important sentimental and sexual influence over such preoccupied natures. The men concerned, or one of them, may present the type of the firm "holder-off" from any relations to women except what are relatively secondary, even apathetic. That is, to woman as a sex. She seems to have no power over the deepest emotional nature, in such men. She plays only a superficial, tolerated, casual rôle in their lives from day to day. Such men seem to say of love for a woman: