"How do you mean?" asked the man.

"Why, everything in the world seems to suggest obscenity to you.
You're always looking for it and always finding it--you don't seem
to care about anything else."

The other was interested in that view of it, and he acknowledged
with mild amusement that it was true; apparently it was a novelty to
him to discuss such matters seriously. He told Thyrsis that he could
not remember having ever restrained a sexual impulse in his life. He
thought of lust in connection with every woman he met, and his mind
was a storehouse of smut. And yet he was not a bad fellow, in other
ways; he handsome, and a good deal of an athlete, and was planning
to be a physician. "You'll find most all the fellows are the same,"
he said.

Not long after this, Thyrsis was selected to represent his college
on a debating-team, and he went away to another city and was invited
to a fraternity-house; and here, suddenly, he discovered how much of
"college-life" he had been missing. This was a fashionable
university, and he met the sons of wealthy parents. About a score of
them lived in this fraternity-house, without any sort of supervision
or restraint. They ate in a beautiful oak-panelled dining-room
adorned with drinking-steins; and throughout the meal they treated
their visitor to such an orgy of obscenity as he had never dreamed
of in his life before. Thyrsis was trapped and could not get away;
and it seemed to him when he rose from the table that there was
nothing left clean in all God's universe. These boys appeared to vie
with each other in blasphemous abandonment; and it was not simply
wantonness--it was sprawling and disgusting filthiness.