the perilous time which comes in every
man's life came in mine. I reached the age when the strongest of all
the passions seizes on the senses, and asserts its mastery over mind and
body alike.

I had hitherto passively endured the wreck of my earliest and dearest
hopes: I had lived patiently, and lived innocently, for Mary's sake. Now
my patience left me; my innocence was numbered among the lost things of
the past. My days, it is true, were still devoted to the tasks set me by
my tutor; but my nights were given, in secret, to a reckless profligacy,
which (in my present frame of mind) I look back on with disgust and
dismay. I profaned my remembrances of Mary in the company of women
who had reached the lowest depths of degradation. I impiously said to
myself: "I have hoped for her long enough; I have waited for her long
enough. The one thing now to do is to enjoy my youth and to forget her."

From the moment when I dropped into this degradation, I might sometimes
think regretfully of Mary--at the morning time, when penitent thoughts
mostly come to us; but I ceased absolutely to see her in my dreams.
We were now, in the completest sense of the word, parted. Mary's pure
spirit could hold no communion with mine; Mary's pure spirit had left
me.

It is needless to say that I failed to keep the secret of my depravity
from the knowledge of my mother. The sight of her grief was the first
influence that sobered me. In some degree at least I restrained myself:
I made the effort to return to purer ways of life. Mr. Germaine, though
I had disappointed him, was too just a man to give me up as lost.
He advised me, as a means of self-reform, to make my choice of a
profession, and to absorb myself in closer studies than any that I had
yet pursued.

I made my peace with this good friend and second father, not only by
following his advice, but by adopting the profession to which he had
been himself attached before he inherited his fortune--the profession of
medicine. Mr. Germaine had been a surgeon: I resolved on being a surgeon
too.

Having entered, at rather an earlier age than usual, on my new way of
life, I may at least say for myself that I worked hard. I won, and kept,
the interest of the professors under whom I studied. On the other hand,
it cannot be denied that my reformation was, morally speaking, far from
being complete. I worked; but what I did was done selfishly, bitterly,
with a hard heart. In religion and morals I adop