V. The Boy Who Never Grew to Be a Man.
For the most part, the present chapter covers my twenty-sixth to thirty-second years, during which my most descriptive nickname was The Soldiers' Friend. For I was foreordained to a sort of army life for many years, detailed in my Autobiography of an Androgyne, but omitted in the present volume. Here I limit myself to some related personal description.
Physique and Psyche: My career as avocational female-impersonator during-the second half-dozen years of my physical prime was even more remarkable than during the first (outlined in Part Three). My quasi-public career as female-impersonator ended at thirty-one—at its very zenith—because I deemed myself too old longer to play the part of "French doll-baby," and because the instinct thereto progressively weakened from the age of thirty. My being able to play that part down to thirty-one was possible only because Nature had endowed me with the proper physique and psyche, already described. Less extreme androgynes lack the qualifications, while practically all the extreme (commonly known as "fairies", "fags", or "brownies") lack the necessary good sense, modesty, temperance, and high grade of general morality that were mine because of my puritan childhood and youth and university education.
The proneness of the eternal feminine greatly to understate her age made me in my twenty-sixth year,
