A’s sexual drives continued to manifest themselves, and to challenge his resistances. He was continually alarmed by the lurking fear that he might be impotent. Although he proposed marriage to two girls when he was a theology student, it is significant that he chose girls from his immediate entourage, and effected an almost instantaneous recovery from his disappointments. This warrants the inference that he was considerably relieved to postpone the test of his potency, and this inference is strengthened by the long years during which he cheerfully acquiesced in the postponement of his marriage to the woman who finally became his wife. He lived with people who valued sexual potency, particularly in its conventional and biological demonstration in marriage and children, and his unmarried state was the object of good-natured comment. His pastoral duties required him to “make calls” on the sisters of the church, and in spite of the cheer which he was sometimes able to bring to the bedridden, there was the faint whisper of a doubt that this was really a man’s job. And though preaching was a socially respectable occupation, there was something of the ridiculous in the fact that one who had experienced very little of life should pass for a privileged censor of all mankind. He had long practice in the art of the impostor. From the plight of his older brother, A learned that he would lose the affection of his father if he was discovered to have indulged in certain practices like masturbation. He resolved never to do anything to cause his father to withdraw his affection, and when he was not entirely successful in living up to this ideal, he pretended to virtues which he did not possess. Never once was he found out, and his life was the life of a “model” boy and man. This reputation he owed in part to his abstinences, but likewise to his concealments. He learned to cultivate the mask of rectitude, and succeeded in carrying off the rôle so successfully that he was never found out during adolescence or adulthood.