Within her subsequent twenty-one years in women’s dormitories as student or faculty member she had reason many times to be glad of all the study she was moved to undertake then and later, for it enabled her to help in averting more than one minor tragedy and to conduct her own life with some measure of wisdom. At first her study was confined to scientific and factual works; but as these sometimes cited pertinent belles lettres its scope gradually widened to include the latter. And, finally, because science and fact were so well listed in the bibliographic tools for specialists, and literature so sporadically or not at all, her investigation came to focus in the area of imaginative writing. The once-perplexed junior is the present writer, and what follows is a product of her extended search. J. H. F. PREFACE For more than a century there has been a tendency to worship science as a key to knowledge and understanding. This preoccupation has served to determine the limits of potential knowledge. Science has created new problems almost as rapidly as it has solved old ones. History records the phenomena of human life. It depends upon biographical data which are notoriously biased. Virtue or viciousness of character varies with the prejudice of the biographer. Most of what is told us in the realm of sexual behavior has been colored by, or has been a reaction to, social, moral, and religious convention. Science proceeds by dissecting reality into its component parts. It has become so preoccupied with the study of these parts that it has failed to grasp the whole. Moreover, it is dependent upon knowledge which can be verified only through the use of the senses, with the result that its adherents have grown sceptical of philosophical and literary evaluations. Its study of elements and forces has led to abstractions, to a greater knowledge of unrealities. In the realm of the sex variant, popular prejudice has reached and maintained its maximum height. The sex variant has always been with us and probably always will be. He has been thus classified, partly because of the arbitrary designations _male_ and _female_. As I have shown in _All the Sexes_, there are any number of possible gradations of human behavior—from that of a theoretical masculine to that of a theoretical feminine being. A particular person is always a complex of masculinity and femininity. Sex variants commonly are conspicuous through the exhibition of characteristics usually associated with the opposite sex. But science continues to recognize the fiction of male and female and has thrown little light on the problem.