Page:Imre.pdf/189

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
187

be crushed, because base and vile. Or that, at any rate was to be forever hid . . hid . . hid . . for his life's sake hid! So Imre had early put on the Mask; the Mask that millions never lay by till death—and many not even then!

And in Imre's case there had come no self justification till late in his sorrowful young manhood. Not until quite newly, when he had discovered how the uranistic nature is regarded by men who are wiser and wider-minded than our forefathers were, had Imre accepted himself as an excusable bit of creation.

Fortunately, Imre had not been born and brought up in an Anglo-Saxon civilization; where is still met, at every side, so dense a blending of popular ignorances; of century-old and century-blind religious and ethical misconceptions, of unscientific professional conservatism in psychiatric circles, and of juristic barbarisms; all, of course, accompanied with the full measure of British or Yankee social hypocrisy toward the daily actualities of homosexualism. By comparison, indeed, any