Uranian? Similisexual? Homosexual? Dionian?
Profound and often all too oppressive, even terrible, can be the significance of those cold psychic-sexual terms to the man who.... "knows." To the man who "knows!" Even more terrible to those who understand them not, may be the human natures of which they are but new and clumsy technical symbols, the mere labels of psychiatric study, within a few decades of medical explorers.
What, then, was my new friend?
I could not determine! The more I reflected, the less I perceived. It is so easy to be deceived by just such a mingling of psychic and physic and temperamental traits; easy to dismiss too readily the counterbalancing qualities. I had learned that much. Long before now, I had found it out as a practical psychiater, in my own interests and necessities, by painful experience. Precisely how suggestive, and yet how adverse... where quite vaguely?.. where with a fairly clear accent?.. was inference in Imre's case to be drawn or thrown aside, those who are intelligent in the subtle problems of Uranianism or its absence, can appreciate best. I had been a good deal struck with the passionate—as it seemed—note in Imre's friendship for the absentee, Karvaly Mihály. I noticed the dominance that men, simply as men, seemed to maintain in Imre's daily life and ideals. I studied his reserved relations toward the other sex; the general scope of his tastes, likes and dislikes, his emotional constitution. But all these suffice not to prove... to prove... the deeply-buried mystery of a heart's uranistic impulses, the mingling in the firm, manly nature of another inborn sexual essence which can be mercifully dormant; or can wax unquiet even to a whole life's unbroken anguish!...
And, after all, why should I... I... seek to drag out from him such a secret of his individuality? Was that for me? Hardly, even if I, probably, of all those who now stood near to Imre von N.... But there! I had no right! Even if I..... But there! I swore to myself that I had no wish!
It was Imre himself who gave me a sort of determinative, just as—after the oaths at which love laughs—I was querying with myself what I might do believe.
One evening, we were walking home, after an hour or so with his father and mother. As we turned the corner of a certain brilliantly-lighted café, a man of perhaps forty years, with the unmistakeable suggestion of a soldier about him, and of much distinction of person along with it, but in civilian's dress, came out and passed us. He looked at Imre as if almost startled. Then he bowed. Imre returned his salutation with so particular a coldness, an immediate change of expression, that I noticed it.
"Who is he?" I asked. "Somehow I fancy he is not in your best books."
"No, I can't say that he is," responded Imre. After a moment of silence he went on. "That gentleman used to be a captain in our regiment. He was asked to leave the service. So he left it—about three years ago."