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14
Childlikeness.

with special frequency to fall in love with disguised persons of their own sex." Your author is really a woman whom Nature disguised as a man.

As late as my middle forties my "childlike face" has been commented upon, and even more my "decidedly childlike manner."' I have been told that my "face wears expressions not ordinarily seen on persons of [my] age," that in the office my childishness is a constant source of mirth with my business associates, even those who have not had the faintest idea that I am sexually abnormal and even addicted to fellatio, and that they watch me while I am working because of my childlike way of doing things and my childlike expression. According to one of my business-associate informants, I still had in my middle thirties "the real childlike naiveté." The term "grownup child" has also been affectionately applied to me by my office associates down to my middle forties, and they have said that teasing me was "just like teasing a child." All through my life, even down to my middle forties, when this book goes to press, my male school or business associates—most of whom have not even suspected my inversion—have taken delight in teasing me as older children a younger child, or as brothers tease their sisters, and I generally liked to be thus teased.

My office associates in a "provincial" city im my middle thirties were far more puritanical and unsophisticated than those in New York City of my middle forties, and never gave any evidence that they even knew of the existence of fairies. But those of the later period showed such knowledge, and several times made remarks to me