Page:MySecretLifeVol1(1888).djvu/95

MY SECRET LIFE seventeen or eighteen, yet my mother thought me a mere child, and most innocent; she told our friends so. I had developed without her having noticed it, love of women, and the intensest desire to understand the secrets of their nature had taken possession of me; the incessant talk of fucking with which the youths I knew beguiled their leisure, the stories they told of having seen their servants, or other girls half, or quite naked, the tricks by which they managed this, the dodges they were up to, inflamed me, sharpened my instinctive accuteness in such matters, and set me seeking every opportunity to know women naked, and sexually. Frigging was now hateful to me; I had never done so more than the times related, that is as far as I now can recollect, frightened as said, by my godfather telling me, that it sent men mad, and made them hateful to women. So although boiling with sensuality, I was still all but a virgin, and actually so in fucking.

A housemaid arrived just as I came home from college, the cook stood at the door, she was a lovely woman about twenty-five or six years old, fresh as a daisy, her name was Mary. The housemaid was in a cart, driven by her father, a small market gardener living a few miles from us. I saw a fresh, comely girl about seventeen years old in the fore-court, turned round to look, she was getting down, the horse moved, she hesitated. “Get down,” said her father angrily. Down she stepped, her clothes caught on the edge of the cart, or step, or somehow; and I saw rapidly appear white stockings, garters, thighs, and a patch of dark hair between them by her belly; it was instantaneous, and down the clothes came, hiding all. I stood —88—