went after the scientific. There was a tall, eager-faced young man,
who proclaimed himself a disciple of Haeckel and Herbert Spencer,
and even went so far as to quote Schopenhauer in class. Walking home
together one day, these two fell to arguing the freedom of the will,
and the nature of motives and desires, and what power one has over
them; and so Thyrsis made the startling discovery that this young
man, having accepted the doctrine of "determinism," had drawn
therefrom the corollary that he had to do what he wanted to do, and
so was powerless to resist his sex-impulses. For the past year this
youth, a fine, intellectual and honest student, had gone at regular
intervals to visit a prostitute; and with entirely scientific and
cold-blooded precision he outlined to Thyrsis the means he took to
avoid contracting disease. Thyrsis listened, feeling as he might
have felt in a slaughter-house; and when, returning to the
deterministic hypothesis, he asked how it was that he had managed to
escape this "necessity", he was told that it must be because he was
of a weaker and less manly constitution.

And there was yet another type: a man with whom there was no
difficulty in bringing up the subject, for the reason that he was
always bringing it up himself. Thyrsis sat next to him in a class in
Latin, and noticed that whenever the text contained any hint at
matters of sex--which was not infrequent in Juvenal and Horace--
this man would look at him with a grin and a sly wink. And sometimes
Thyrsis would make a casual remark in conversation, and the man
would twist it out of its meaning, or make a pun out of it--to find
some excuse for his satyr's leer. So at last Thyrsis was moved to
say to him--"Don't you ever realize what a state you've got your
mind into?"