Page:Autobiography of an Androgyne 1918 book scan.djvu/216

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186
Fairie Adventures in Europe.

On returning to New York, I engaged an electrical apprentice to continue the search, but all my efforts proved fruitless. ******* I now spent five months in Europe with my employer. I was generally free evenings, and during our stay in the large cities, spent two or three a week with beaux that I came across. I had considerable conversational ability in four foreign languages. In Paris I generally spent my evenings with the adolescent porters of the Gare St. Lazaire, and in Berlin with soldiers whom I met in the Tier-garten. Because of indiscretions, I came near being arrested in Berlin and in Naples. In only one instance in Europe was an attempt made to extort money from me, and I yielded rather than get into trouble.

My flirtations in Europe were uneventful. I had to be far more cautious there for fear of getting into trouble, and associate with my beaux clad as a prosperous citizen. As they necessarily knew that I was a person of attainments much higher than the average, I was restrained from going far in impersonation of a young woman or a baby. I found that throughout the large cities, fairies were as well known to the ultra-virile adolescents as in New York, and the latter were equally susceptible to the advances of the former.

In my unusually wide travels in America, I have never been accosted by a pervert or an invert. But during my five months' sojourn in Europe, I was one evening accosted in one of the great capitals by a fairie sixteen years of age, and in another I was accosted in a park by