“Oh, I know all right. Didn’t you get many tonight?”
“I was only looking for you. I cannot express how beautiful you appear to me. Please excuse me for being so outspoken.”
The “Other Side” of a Senior’s Life.
“Oh, there’s no harm done.”
“You are the most beautiful and best dressed fellow I have seen this evening. Won’t you please, please, take me as your valet and slave? I will serve you for nothing.”
He happened to be living in a furnished-room house in the neighborhood. Arrived in his room, he treated me with marvellous gallantry, as if I had been a queen. For several weeks, I spent an evening in his company. He introduced me to his companions, they to theirs in turn, and before long I numbered among my acquaintances scores of the habitues of the gambling halls and other dens of vice of this quarter of the city, and associated with them in these places, though fellatio and coquetry were my own only departures from a most puritanical life. Such an environment was it that fate had in store for the innocent stripling of a few years ago who had chosen for himself the self-abnegating career of a foreign missionary.
Outside of this one evening each week in which I gave free rein to my “baby girl” proclivities, however, I continued to be a most industrious collegian, even winning prizes because of my excelling all others in some branches. My every-day circle had no suspicion of the double life I was leading. Whenever returning home after an evening passed as a fairie, I took the most extreme precautions that I should not be followed, and of course concealed from all who knew me as “Jennie June” that I was a person of more than a common-school education.
Depilation.
All classes of sporting men—young actors, professional gamblers, racetrack bookmakers, and adolescents of some means and without occupation other than to sip continually of all the gross pleasures of life—constituted the associates of “Jennie June” during the following year and a half. I read in the newspaper several times that one of my paramours held a world’s record in one branch of sport. I found that very few of this moneyed, sporting class cared to go beyond joking with me and teasing me, and none beyond the age of twenty-five ever went to extremes. In this neighborhood at that time female filles de joie were numerous, and the sporting men were more than satiated. The fairie’s success is inversely proportional to unmarried adolescents’ opportunities with the gentle sex.
About the beginning of my 14th Street career as a high-class fairie, I removed all the growth of hair on my body and limbs by means of a safety razor so that they were as glabrous as statuary. I considered that I thus beautified my body. The operation had to be repeated about once every two months. I would let the hair on the face grow for a full week, remaining in my room continuously the final two days, Saturday and Sunday, because of my untidy appearance. I would then pull it all out by the roots through the application of depilatory wax. For two or three weeks subsequently my face would be as devoid of hair as any woman’s, when the new growth would reach the surface of the skin. After another week’s growth, it was necessary to repeat the operation. I had hoped that the repeated violence to the hair-cells would destroy their functioning and I would be permanently rid of facial hair, my most detested mark of the male, but there was no appreciable effect. I also feared the repeated operation might occasion a malignant growth, but I was ready to take every risk.