To really emit is to spoil the thing. Of course, such a scene as I had under my eyes in photographing the secret charms of dear Louisa threw all my philosophy to the winds and, as soon as I was alone, I could not refrain from frigging myself until a copious discharge relieved me from my extreme excitement. I also confess that once, I became so awfully hard when reading Petronius, where the tutor seduces his beautiful pupil after dinner when the governor is asleep, that the exquisite lubricity of the description, and the exciting way that he worked her up to his purpose, so overcame me that I unbuttoned my breeches and could not help indulging in a delicious emission brought on rapidly by a few energetic rubbings of my throbbing organ. And in either of these cases you, my foolish critic, would have done just the same. But, joking apart, and notwithstanding occasional slips, I am completely opposed, on every ground, to this weakening and really insipid vice, so ruinous, too, to the constitution and power of enjoyment that lies in the real union of the sexes.
However, to return to my story, just let me tell you what happened when Tom, that very afternoon, saw the glorious photograph of Louisa.
First, I must recount what I should have told you in my last letter, had not the relation of the scene so overcome me that I could not go on, but was obliged to relieve my bursting sensations as described. To return, after taking the photograph, we sat down together on the sofa, and the dear girl, in all the confidence of innocence and of trust in me, threw her arms round my neck and gave me a long and loving kiss. Despite that addition to the fuel that had already set my passions on fire, I managed to constrain any outward demonstration, wishing to win her entire and unrestrained confidence in me so that I should become, as it were, her father confessor, to whom she could open out all the secrets of her most inward thoughts and I fully succeeded. We had a long conversation of a most private character. I found laid open to me the mind of a girl (or rather woman) of a most imaginative and amorous tendency, exhibiting intense curiosity regarding the differences and the relations between the sexes. She was, however, apparently almost innocent of the great sensation. After I had satisfied her curiosity about the sexes and their mutual desires and modes of gratifying them, both in couples and alone, she confessed that a strange thrill had passed through her when she saw the nudities in our public collections, and that, after being alone for a few moments before a fine young Antinous in the Louvre she had been so affected that she went up to her room after dinner, fastened the door and looked at her uncovered person, in exactly the way I had placed her before the cheval glass, from her own easy-chair. She put her hand down and pressed it on her excited secret parts, and tried to insert a finger, but it hurt her. She pushed it in further and found it pressed upon something hard that gave her a most extraordinary and almost overpowering sensation. She thought she was going to faint, but was suddenly relieved and found all her parts quite wet. She was greatly alarmed and frightened at this, and thought she must have somehow injured herself, and had not dared to mention it to any one at home. She now wanted to know from me how this could have happened. I fully explained all.
'But, can the Antinous go… go into…,' she stammered, 'into… you know where I mean?'
I told her that excitement makes it swell up and become stiff and straight and explained that, if moved up and down inside her own part, it would produce boundless rapture. The whole matter was clearly set before her, and I told her that the new photograph would give dear Tom a kind of relief to his great excitement, which must be somehow allayed. The upshot of all this was my promising to photograph Tom for her. But she added, hesitantly,
'You know he must be-what do you call it? — I mean so that it would go in as you described-sticking out, you know-if looking at that wicked photograph can make him so, and he must be just as much shown to me as I am to him.'