Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/529

 will not under any future circumstances break the confidence reposed in him; except to state distinctly that no money-troubles, no affair connected with the other sex, and no illness brought the tragedy. The reason will probably therefore remain ever obscure, perhaps wisely so. The deceased was a reserved, quiet, well-mannered young man, living a very orderly life in handsome apartments, cared little for social gatherings, and was chiefly in company with a very few friends of his own sex, of various nationalities."

Uranian suicides occur that do not refer to persecutions, nor to dread or criminal and social aspects of some indiscretion. Passional romances mix themselves in the catalogue. Rosalind declared flippantly that "men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for love." Uranian friends—lovers—often prove the irony of the phrase. About ten years ago, an English Uranian, not known to be homosexual except to a very small fraction of his large social circle, committed suicide, while travelling abroad. It was a deliberate suicide, but so adroitly carried out that his near relations, like nineteen-twentieths of his friends, probably never for an instant have thought that the tragedy was not an accident. He left no such notion in the minds of the few persons who were in his morbid secret—some of them, in fact, during weeks had dreaded just such a climax. He had fallen violently in love with a man (much his junior) a type from which no possible return of such a passion, or even toleration of it could be expected. At the end of the second year of the acquaintance, the youth concerned had practically quite broken off the social intimacy, clearly because of perceiving the older man's sexual emotions. The ill-starred Urning struggled to forget, but in vain; and at the end of a certain week of peculiarly intense suffering and nervous disruption (as shown by his diary) he planned and consummated his own shocking death. An American psychiater gave to the writer a somewhat similarly tragic history, which ended in the suicide of an-artist, advanced in life, simply because he had nor been able to overcome his love for another