You know, I was just coming on that age where tolerance for the natural effeminacy of young boys rapidly wanes. It felt to me as if the whole neighborhood had come together in a great conspiracy to correct my deportment. Close family, distant relatives, the grocer, the schoolmistress, everyone would remind me that I was a boy and should behave thusly, how to walk and speak and play, or rather how not to walk and not to speak and not to play. They said these things not in a bullying way, not out of cruelty, but as a matter of fact.
