with an almost sacred veneration were subjects for immense jokes. A few
years ago he would have been horrified at it all, but the fine quality
of this first sensitiveness had been blunted since his experience at
college. He tolerated these things in his friends now.

Gradually Vandover allowed his ideas and tastes to be moulded by this
new order of things. He assumed the manners of these young men of the
city, very curious to see for himself the other lower side of their life
that began after midnight in the private rooms of fast cafés and that
was continued in the heavy musk-laden air of certain parlours amid the
rustle of heavy silks.

Slowly the fascination of this thing grew upon him until it mounted to a
veritable passion. His strong artist's imagination began to be filled
with a world of charming sensuous pictures.

He commenced to chafe under his innate respect and deference for women,
to resent and to despise it. As the desire of vice, the blind, reckless
desire of the male, grew upon him, he set himself to destroy this
barrier that had so long stood in his way. He knew that it was the
wilful and deliberate corruption of part of that which was best in him;
he was sorry for it, but persevered, nevertheless, ashamed of his
old-time timidity, his ignorance, his boyish purity.

For a second time the animal in him, the perverse evil brute, awoke and
stirred. The idea of resistance hardly occurred to Vandover; it would be
hard, it would be disagreeable to resist, and Vandover had not
accustomed himself to the performance of hard, disagreeable duties. They
were among the unpleasant things that he shirked. He told himself that
later on, when he had grown older and steadier and had profited by