Suburban Souls, Book I

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My great fear in setting forth this simple adventure of love and passion is that I shall not be able to carry home to my reader's mind the feelings, the hopes, the doubts and fears that so long racked my soul and stirred up all that was good and bad in the heart and brain of the writer-a very ordinary man.

I have always been a great reader of amatory literature and all books and novels relating to sexual matters, whether willfully obscene or cunningly veiled; whether written by medical authorities, novelists, or even issued from the secret presses of Belgium and Holland. I often remarked that such tales were far from true to nature. I do not speak of lewd worlds, where impossibilities are presented merely to augment the sale of the volumes, but of the few which impress us with an idea of truth, being incidents which, although highly colored, might perhaps have happened all the same. Such are some of the best French novels. But most of them are written by men who misjudge women, and when lady novelists write about love they seldom show us a woman as she really is, their sympathy for their own sex guiding their partial pens in spite of themselves. Really true tales of sensuality are thus rare, and I come forward to give you mine, where I have carefully endeavored to keep my imagination within bounds and tell nothing but what did really happen.

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