replied
grandly. "I could tell you much worse things than that."

This he proceeded to do. Fascinated, I listened with a sickening
sensation. It was a mild afternoon in spring, and we stood in the deep
limestone gutter in front of the parsonage, a little Gothic wooden house
set in a gloomy yard.

"I thought," said I, "that people couldn't love any more after they were
married, except each other."

Alec looked at me pityingly.

"You'll get over that notion," he assured me.

Thus another ingredient entered my character. Denied its food at
home, good food, my soul eagerly consumed and made part of itself the
fermenting stuff that Alec Pound so willing distributed. And it was
fermenting stuff. Let us see what it did to me. Working slowly but
surely, it changed for me the dawning mystery of sex into an evil
instead of a holy one. The knowledge of the tragedy of Grace Hollister
started me to seeking restlessly, on bookshelves and elsewhere, for
a secret that forever eluded me, and forever led me on. The word
fermenting aptly describes the process begun, suggesting as it does
something closed up, away from air and sunlight, continually working in
secret, engendering forces that fascinated, yet inspired me with fear.
Undoubtedly this secretiveness of our elders was due to the pernicious
dualism of their orthodox Christianity, in which love was carnal and
therefore evil, and the flesh not the gracious soil of the spirit, but
something to be deplored and condemned, exorcised and transformed by
the miracle of grace. Now love had become a terrible power (gripping me)
whose enchantment drove men and women from home and friends and kindred
to the uttermost parts of the earth....

It was long before I got to sleep that night after my talk with Alec
Pound. I alternated between the horror and the romance of the story I
had heard, supplying for myself the details he had omitted: I beheld
the signals from the windows, the clandestine meetings, the sudden and
desperate flight. And to think that all this could have happened in our
city not five blocks from where I lay!

My consternation and horror were concentrated on the man,--and yet I
recall a curious bifurcation. Instead of experiencing that automatic
righteous indignation which my father and mother had felt, which had
animated old Mr. Jules Hollister when he had sternly forbidden his
daughter's name to be mentioned in his presence, which had made these
people outcasts, there