The germ from which this book has grown was implanted nearly forty years ago when a student council voted one spring afternoon to dismiss two girls from a college dormitory unless they altered their habits. To one junior council member several features of the council session made it memorable. It was an unscheduled meeting and was convened quietly so as to render it secret. The absence of freshman and sophomore members indicated a “morals case,” for in those days the younger students were thus sheltered from evil intelligence. Most striking of all was the utter incomprehensibility of the issue at stake.
The bewildered junior was herself younger than her peers, and outside the realm of books was ignorant to a degree incredible today. She had understood the earlier expulsion of a girl who stayed out all night, for after all one had simply accepted from childhood that such conduct was disreputable. But why should locking themselves into their room together lay two students open to rigorous discipline? To her private humiliation, everyone else appeared to know. The business was dispatched with embarrassed speed and by blind allusion rather than open statement. Her relief was great when opinion favored probation for the brief remainder of the year. For she could not have cast her vote for expulsion without understanding the cause.
She left the meeting with her mortifying ignorance undisclosed; but it rankled. She had never before been the most stupid in any group. And her curiosity was aroused. The two culprits were to her among the least attractive girls in college both physically and temperamentally. How could they be so obsessed with one another as to lock themselves in their room together at every opportunity? She was determined to learn. She went to the college library where day after day she had passed the row of worn tan volumes labeled Studies in the Psychology of Sex without once having the impulse to look inside. Now she explored tables of contents with the same slight nausea that had accompanied initial zoology laboratory dissection. Thus she met Havelock Ellis.[1]
Within her subsequent twenty-one years in women’s dormitories as student or faculty member she had reason many times to be glad of all the study she was moved to undertake then and later, for it enabled her to help in averting more than one minor tragedy and to conduct her own life with some measure of wisdom. At first her study was confined to scientific and factual works; but as these sometimes cited pertinent belles lettres its scope gradually widened to include the latter. And, finally, because science and fact were so well listed in the bibliographic tools for specialists, and literature so sporadically or not at all, her investigation came to focus in the area of imaginative writing. The once-perplexed junior is the present writer, and what follows is a product of her extended search.
J. H. F.