atisfaction from his father and by and by
began to be ashamed to ask him; why, he did not know. Although he could
not help hearing the abominable talk of the High School boys, he at
first refused to believe that part of it which he could understand. For
all that he was ashamed of his innocence and ignorance and affected to
appreciate their stories nevertheless.

At length one day he heard the terse and brutal truth. In an instant he
believed it, some lower, animal intuition in him reiterating and
confirming the fact. But even then he hated to think that people were so
low, so vile. One day, however, he was looking through the volumes of
the old Encyclopaedia Britannica in his father's library, hoping that he
might find a dollar bill which the Old Gentleman told him had been at
one time misplaced between the leaves of some one of the great tomes.
All at once he came upon the long article "Obstetrics," profusely
illustrated with old-fashioned plates and steel engravings. He read it
from beginning to end.

It was the end of all his childish ideals, the destruction of all his
first illusions. The whole of his rude little standard of morality was
lowered immediately. Even his mother, whom he had always believed to be
some kind of an angel, fell at once in his estimation. She could never
be the same to him after this, never so sweet, so good and so pure as he
had hitherto imagined her.

It was very cruel, the whole thing was a grief to him, a blow, a great
shock; he hated to think of it. Then little by little the first taint
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 w