I had early grown accustomed to the attention we attracted wherever we went. The father - always elegantly dressed, with his old-fashioned pompousness and melancholy eyes - and the son - nearly as tall and bearing a striking resemblance to him. Especially for women we were subjects of interest. But my father never seemed to pay any attention to this, nor did I ever see him come into closer contact with any woman.
But to me, long before I could appreciate the beauties of art and of nature, a glance from the eyes of a woman was the most precious of all life had to offer. That I primarily accounted as unalloyed gold outweighing much anguish and trouble.
I will try to be exact and absolutely sincere. I may avail myself of that privilege - old while I write, and dead when I shall be read. I am of a very amorous nature and the thought of friend or sweetheart was always an oasis in the desert of my thoughts. Even amidst the most important cares and duties such thoughts were ever of unspeakably greater interest and importance to me. They were never dull or tedious, never bored me, and were my consolation in times of gloom and discouragement. The pain they brought was also dear to me, and never possessed the loathsome hatefulness of other barren vital pangs.
It is difficult for me to recall when the first beams of this great and chiefest joy of life began to shine more brightly for me, but I cannot have been much over five or six years old. I played the passive part at the time, and it was the girl who chose me as her friend and invited the attention which I right willingly bestowed. But when later I myself went out to seek the joys of love, I thought only of boy friends. And it was a boy, a tall pale Hollander and, as it now seems to me, certainly not a very attractive lad, whom I approached one bright summers eve wandering together in the starlight, with the proposition of eternal friendship. The pale lad possessed what is called common sense and replied that he had too vague a conception of eternity to dare accept this proposal. Later, among women I have seldom met with such conscientious scruples.
Our constant travelling made all these attachments very brief and transitory and, as a child in search of love cares nothing for caste prejudice, they were also very diverse, but therefore none the less intense. I loved a nice brown-eyed and barefooted Livornian fisher lad, because he was so strong and could row so well, and swim like a fish. And later, when I was bigger, it was a young German travelling salesman who taught me college songs and impressed me with his show of greater worldly wisdom, that won my heart. In these relations I was always the most ardent enthusiast, fervently pining, filled day and night with the subject of my love. And it can still make the blood rise to my wan cheeks when I think of the treasures of devotion that I squandered on these unresponsive beings. But now I know too that I may count myself lucky that they were so unresponsive. For through this wandering life at my father's side I had remained green as grass, and how easily one all too responsive might have turned the young tender instinct, with which the Genius of Humanity has endowed us, forever from its destined course to life-long torture. For we are all, man and woman alike, born with a twofold nature, and the pliant young shoot can so easily be contorted and its rightful growth permanently warped.
The maiden saw in me the lover long before I began to look on her with a lover's eyes. I had, indeed, found the unspeakable joy of intimacy surpassing and atoning for all, but not yet the peculiar higher joy of an intimacy, with greater disparity, between youth and maid. I thought all intimacy glorious if it was but very fervent, and even entertained some vague notion regarding the great joy of an intimacy and cordiality embracing all, man and woman, young and old. But these moments of revelation and insight were but very brief and buried forthwith under commonplaces.
It must have been between the age of ten and twelve, that looking into the bright eyes of a girl, I first experienced that peculiar and higher bliss, that boy friendship could not give me. This was an event that so engrossed me, that I was oblivious of everything else and walked about like one moving in a dream.
I know not whether it was due to the blood of my fair northern mother, but never could a southern, dark-eyed and black-haired lass fascinate and interest me so vehemently and intensely as a blue-eyed blonde. Especially the English type, the cool, self-possessed, as well as somewhat haughty and coy blonde maiden, slender and yet strong, with wavy hair, attracted my attention and interest with an irresistible power.
Have patience, dear reader, it is a delicate and difficult matter, and I must deliberate well and speak carefully if we would more deeply penetrate the meaning of these things.
When these feelings overtake us as a child, we think it is the personality, that it is Alice or Bertha who interests us so intensely, and that only Alice or only Bertha can inspire such strange and powerful emotions of bliss and desire. And above all that it is just Alice or just Bertha whose more intimate acquaintance is so eminently desirable.
But how is it possible that we retain this illusion, and even live and die in it - pleasant and enviable though it may be - when we know that each feels this same interest in some other and ofttimes even see it transferred from one to another?
Being in love is the desire to fathom a most interesting secret, indispensable to us all. The beloved maiden attracts us, as a ray of light attracts the wanderer in the dark. Yet we know that every creature of her kind can shed this radiance about her, and that it is simply our own accidental receptivity that, among so many thousands, gives to this one creature in particular her attractive power.
Thus I think I can positively say that it was not herself I sought in my beloved, but the reflection of one common light that also shines through other windows as well as through the eyes in which I discovered it. But though my reason must affirm it, my heart comprehends little of this. When I think of her whom I loved last, longest and most devotedly, then she herself, her own personality, is a certainty to me that I would not willingly relinquish for any higher certainty, many years though I have spent in anxious pondering on this subject.
The list of my boy friends is not worth recording. They were puppets wondrously decked out by my fertile imagination, worshipped as heroes for a while with all the ritual of German friendship cult - and later, when in their personal life they showed no resemblance to my ideal expectations, rudely dismantled and cast aside and hated. I can still see a photograph of one of them lying in my washbowl with pierced eyes, curling and charring under the avenging flame of a match.
The last of the series, the young commercial traveller, longest retained his glory. I saw him only about a week in a watering place, and subsequently he was able to maintain his position of hero-friend by a correspondence in which he answered my fervent ingenuousness stammered in poor German with fluent plagiarism from the classics of his romantic fatherland. All went well, until after a few years I met him again and noticed that it was not even a puppet but a skeleton that I had arrayed in a hero's armor. I was furious at him as though he had purposely deceived me - but my anger was unmerited. He had in perfect good faith tried his best to live up to the national traditions of friendship and to keep burning the smouldering fire of his own humble ideal of love.
A friend, who would have paid me in my own coin, who requited what I desired to give him, - as, faithful, as devoted, as passionate, as self-sacrificing, as attentive and solicitous as it was my nature to understand and prove friendship - such a one I never found. And I was unreasonable enough to retain a bitter and scornful feeling toward those who, seeming to give promise of such an exalted friendship, had disappointed me so sorely. I now understand how good it is that at this age such friendships do not exist. Is it not hard enough to extricate ourselves from the seemingly hopeless complications of sexual instincts and relations? Are we not still far from the adjustment of passions, arising much too early and continuing much too long? physical and mental desires, affections misplaced, extinguished and transferred to others? and children who must be fed? Should we desire to add to these problems the complications of strong friendships which might perhaps