Page:Imre.pdf/188

186 the homosexual man and social canons—or of the battle with just himself! Ah, these dramas of the Venus Urania! played out into death, in silent but terribly-troubled natures!—among all sorts and conditions of men!

"'C'est Venus, tout entière à sa proie attachèe'..."

Imre's youth had been, indeed, one long and lamentable obsession of precocious, inborn homosexuality. Imre (just as in many instances) had never been a weakling, an effeminate lad, nor cared for the society of the girls about him on the playground or in the house. On the contrary, his sexual and social indifference or aversion to them had been always thoroughly consistent with the virile emotions of that sort. But there had been the boy-friendships that were passions; the sense of his being cut of key with his little world in them; the deepening certitude that there was a mystery in himself that "nobody would understand"; some element rooted in him that was mocked by the whole boy-world, by the whole man-world. A part of himself to be crushed out, if it could