Page:The Female-Impersonators 1922 book scan.djvu/78

56 nouncements of a physician than of a Bible school teacher.

In that same immediate puritan circle in my childhood's village, I have lately observed a similar case in the next generation. I have known well a certain gentleman of my own age since we were boys together. He is of the tremendously virile type and sowed his wild oats as hardly another young blood in the village. But in his middle twenties he was "soundly converted" in a puritan church (to which I myself belonged) and married one of its purest daughters. In his subsequent life, he attained rare success financially and socially. He has had only two children—both girls around twenty years of age at the date of writing. I know the family intimately. I have direct information that both girls are "fast going to the bad" (notwithstanding they have always been under only puritan influences) and that the father has "backslidden," evidently being no longer able to restrain his de facto polygamous instincts. The purest of wives is heart-broken and on the borderline of insanity.

Every one says the girls and their father are wilfully depraved and their puritan community has already begun to treat them as outcasts. I say the girls inherited their craze for venery from their father, in whom likewise it was inborn. He is a noble man in every other respect. All three are largely irresponsible. They are, by birth, not fitted for the puritan society in which they were brought up. Under present social ideas and usages, the only outlet for the girls is prostitution and the consequent early loss of health soon terminating in death. But their only fault is