of celluloid around me: namely, I had been in love with the little girl, under the high-minded pretense of being a big sister and friend to the orphan.
If I were to detail all the things I called myself in the next few weeks, this publication would come und er the intimate scrutiny of the postal authorities; "freak" was the least of them. One thing was certain: I could no longer hide my he ad in the sand and read my issues of THE LADDER as an interested but detached outsider.
I was still rationalizing. I told myself that my frustrating and imperfect marriage was at the bottom of my return to an adolescent manifestation (oh, Doctor Freud!). However, I still came smack up against unalterable fact: if my marriage was 30 frustrating, why hadn't I been doing some thing about it? Why had I not been casting longing looks at our handsome young grocery clerks and at the college boys who worked with my husband, rather than at my own music pupils, these little girls of fifteen and seventeen who were themselves at the threshold of marriage and motherhood? dissatisfied with a good and daydreaming about an elopement than listening dreamily to the over the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts?
If my decadent tastes were sincero man, why wasn't I with Clark Gable, rather voices of the sopranos
A rigorous analysis of my own past has shown me that my emotional tendencies were well established long before the classical traumatic experience in my teens. I married under the impression that homosexual tendencies were an adole scent phase. I allowed myself to be per suaded into marriage by a random bit of data: the irrelevant fact that I enjoyed sex relations with men.
Perhaps circumstances might have allowed me to be blind forever. Being as I am, I prefer knowing the truth. Where I will go from the "house on the border land," I do not know. It is certain that I am not seeking "forbidden thrills" in the "dark world." I know myself to be an outcast there. And I am, as I stated in the fable, bound by strong tie s: a good and kind man, and a child Just reaching the age where a father is most necessary. Wherever I go, I break at least one heart. But the house
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