Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/55

 "friendship" the most concentrated and absorbing of similisexual loves. No matter what have been the biographic glosses and subterfuges, no matter what have been the amiable fictions, no matter how indignant have been the denials, the real bond was welded by a profound, mysterious, noble, passionate sexualism. Such too, are examples that every day could disclose about us, right and left. Everywhere are the ties absolutely embodying the antique, eternal sentiment; yet trembling at revelation of it to the outside world. The link is a marriage of the body as well as of the soul. It is a love: not a friendship. It is the supremely virile love, expressing itself as human nature, naturally and inevitably, ever has expressed itself in a vast proportion of all races and grades of mankind. But such physical erotism in multitudinous instances has not a jot impaired the high spiritual quality of the relation. It has often enriched it. The psychic and the physical have been blent in it, in an harmonious chemistry, too subtle and natural for vulgar analysis. The bodily and the spiritual passion have been each the complement of the other, by Nature's initiative, and by Divine impulsion.

We may often be misled by one trait external to such mysterious passion in similisexual intimacies—the attitude of one or both friends toward women. Damon is not a woman-hater, not a mere woman-tolerator, perhaps: but a woman-amateur, even to being a coureur des femmes at least by repute. Pythias often plays his social role of woman-enthusiast, with the finest touches of art and nature. But the two friends knows what we do not know. Their comedy can be smiled at or deplored by them, according to its difficulties and necessities. Marriage can hide the real situation of the similisexual love. But marriage can try in vain to expel it. Damon remains Damon, Pythias remains