Page:The Female-Impersonators 1922 book scan.djvu/280

252 psyche better revenge itself on his carnal body than to have the latter's grossness proclaimed on the housetops.

[In case Z was a suicide, the idol who had only a few minutes before pitilessly scorned his advances was very likely an adolescent spending that afternoon on one of the three nearest yachts. As I have said, the case came to a curious abrupt ending in the papers, as if the entire solution had become known to those immediately interested, but the public was not let into the secret in order to shield unblameworthy parties.

[If Z was a suicide, I have myself passed through a very similar experience. (See my, page 235.) Because heartlessly jilted by a new idol and afraid I would as "a monster of depravity," be cast out of the caravan with which I was travelling in an uninhabited region of the Rockies, I walked away in the forest alone at dusk a mile from camp having in mind suicide by being torn to pieces by bears, with which the forest abounded, and several of which I saw that night roaming within a hundred feet. Like Z, I had not left behind a single oral or written word as to suicide. I was acting on the spur of the moment. For several hours I experienced such depths of sorrow as not one human out of ten thousand ever tastes. Continuously for an hour, out of hearing of the camp, I wailed at the top of my voice over my terrible lot in life—that of a despised, hated, and outlawed "degenerate" (as the hypocritical nine-tenths of civilized humanity delight to call" me)—and over the possibly impending unfathomable disgrace among a party of rough men with whom I must travel until we got back to a railroad. I experienced a violent desire