When I first read Rabelais and the 'Poems and Ballads,' I was ignorant of my own body; I looked upon the relationship of man and woman as something essentially wicked; my imagination took fire, but I was hardly conscious of any physical reality connected with it. I was irrepressibly timid in the presence of a woman; I hardly ever met young people of my own age; and I had a feeling of the deepest reverence for women, from which I endeavoured to banish the slightest consciousness of sex. I thought it an inexcusable disrespect; and in my feeling towards the one or two much older women who at one time or another had a certain attraction for me, there was nothing, conscious at least, but a purely romantic admiration. At the same time I had a guilty delight in reading books which told me about the sensations of physical love, and I trembled with ecstasy as I read them. Thoughts of them haunted me; I put them out of my head by an effort, I called them back, they ended by never leaving me. I think it was a little earlier than this that I began to walk in my sleep, and to have nightmares; but it was just then that I suffered most from those obscure terrors of the night. Once, when I was a child, I remember waking up in my nightshirt on the drawing-room sofa, and being wrapped up in a shawl and carried upstairs by my father, and put back into bed. I had come down in my sleep, opened the door, and walked into the room without seeing any one, and laid myself down on the sofa. I did not often dream, but, whenever I dreamed, it was of infinite spirals, up which I had to climb, or of ladders, whose rungs dropped away from me as my feet left them, or of slimy stone stairways into cold pits of darkness, or of the tightening of a snake's coils around me, or of walking with bare feet across a floor curdling with snakes. I awoke, stifling a scream, my hair damp with sweat, out of impossible tasks in which time shrank and swelled in some deadly game with life; something had to be done in a second, and all eternity passed, lingering, while the second poised over me like a drop of water always about to drip: it fell, and I was annihilated into depth under depth of blackness.