Having been born into a large fortune, adversity and want were unknown to me during the years of my childhood and young adulthood. Happily I was given, by nature, a desire for hard work and success that raised me up amongst my peers and showed me a path to a golden future. My only shortcoming, as I saw it, was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, maybe a thing unshameful in itself, but something hard to reconcile with my public face of service and rectitude. It is not that my desires were so base and wanton as to be unacceptable, but a man of the position I hoped to achieve must, if he can not be beyond reproach in fact, be beyond reproach in the perception of others. To this end, I buried these feelings and needs within me allowing them only a limited reign in private.

After some years, having achieved much that I had hoped for, I found myself in a position of some social standing, but with a very tangible split between the two sides of my character: the public face of a well-respected doctor, and the private face of a much less savoury man. It is my belief that this division is evident in all men, with their more low and acceptable desires being no less real for all their concealment by public decency. Maybe it was something within my particular spirit, maybe something caused by the great height of my civic position, but I feel that the depth of my darkness was greater than in normal men. These two poles were never in opposition, however, as whichever part of me held sway, I always acted from true desire and never from cant or duplicity. When I treated a patient, it was from a genuine desire to heal and to bring succour. When I studied to bring greater knowledge to the world, it was with the urge to better the world we live in. Likewise, when I delved deep within myself and laid restraint aside to plunge in shame, I was always in earnest.