crept in, the innate vice stirred in him, the brute began to make itself
felt, and a multitude of perverse and vicious ideas commenced to buzz
about him like a swarm of nasty flies.

A certain word, the blunt Anglo-Saxon name for a lost woman, that he
heard on one occasion among the boys at school, opened to him a vista of
incredible wickedness, but now after the first moment of revolt the
thing began to seem less horrible. There was even a certain attraction
about it. Vandover soon became filled with an overwhelming curiosity,
the eager evil curiosity of the schoolboy, the perverse craving for the
knowledge of vice. He listened with all his ears to everything that was
said and went about through the great city with eyes open only to its
foulness. He even looked up in the dictionary the meanings of the new
words, finding in the cold, scientific definitions some strange sort of
satisfaction.

There was no feminine influence about Vandover at this critical time to
help him see the world in the right light and to gauge things correctly,
and he might have been totally corrupted while in his earliest teens had
it not been for another side of his character that began to develop
about the same time.

This was his artistic side. He seemed to be a born artist. At first he
only showed bent for all general art. He drew well, he made curious
little modellings in clayey mud; he had a capital ear for music and
managed in some unknown way of his own to pick out certain tunes on the
piano. At one time he gave evidence of a genuine talent for the stage.
For days he would pretend to be some dreadful sort of character, he did
not know whom, talking to himself, stamping and shaking his fists; then
he would dress himself in an old smoking-cap, a red table-cloth and one