Page:Imre.pdf/183

181 "Look into thyself, Oswald! It is all there. I am an Uranian, as thou art. From my birth I have been one. Wholly, wholly homosexual, Oswald! The same fire, the same, that smoulders or flashes in thee! It was put into my soul and body too, along with whatever else is in them that could make me wish to win the sympathy of just such a friend as thee, or make thee wish to seek mine. My youth was like thine; and to become older, to grow up to be a man in years, a man in every sinew and limb of my body, there was no changing of my nature in that. There were only the bewilderments, concealments, tortures that come to us. There is nothing, nothing, that any man can teach me of what is one's life with it all. How well I know it! That inborn mysterious, frightful sensitiveness to whatever is the man—that eternal vague yearning and seeking for the unity that can never come save by a love that is held to be a crime and a shame! The instinct that makes us cold toward the woman, even to hating her, when one thinks of her as a sex. And the mask, the eternal mask! to be worn