The theory of evolution came as a natural thing to me. It seemed that I
knew it all, before,--as I did, because, in my own way, I had thought
out the problem of the growth of the varying forms of animal life,
exactly to the Darwinian conclusion.

Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_ became my Bible.

* * * * *

It was at this time that I made the harrowing discovery that I had been
working evil on myself ... through an advertisement of a quack in a
daily paper.

And now I became an anchorite battling to save myself from the newly
discovered monstrosity of the flesh.... For several days I would be the
victor, but the thing I hugged to my bosom would finally win. Then would
follow a terror beyond comprehension, a horror of remorse and
degradation that human nature seemed too frail to bear. I grew thinner
still. I fell into a hacking cough.

And, at the same time, I became more perverse in my affectation of
innocence and purity--saying always to my father that I never could care
for girls, and that what people married for was beyond my comprehension.
Thus I threw his alarmed inquisitiveness off the track....

I procured books about sexual life. My most cherished volume was an old
family medical book with charred covers, smelling of smoke and water,
that I had dug out of the ruins of a neighbouring fire.

In the book was a picture of a nude woman, entitled _The Female Form