I sought out a scarlet woman in the streets of
---- and went home with her. From something she said to me I know
that I gave her pleasure, and she asked me to come to her again.
This I did twice, but without any real pleasure. The whole thing
was too sordid and soulless, and the man who decides to take an
evil medicine regularly has first to make up his mind that he
really needs it.
"At about the same time I chanced to be, for a few months, in a
German university town, and I determined, as I had the
opportunity, to carry the parental advice to the logical
conclusion. I tried a licensed house. The place was clean and
decent, and the conditions, I take it, such as one would normally
find in any properly regulated continental city; but to me the
whole thing appeared unspeakably horrible. It was a purely
commercial transaction, and it had not even the redeeming element
of risk to one's self, or of offense against a social or
disciplinary code. I came away feeling that I had touched bottom
in my sexual experiences, and I understood what it was that Faust
saw when the red mouse sprang from the mouth of the witch in the
Walpurgis dance.
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