rivate rooms of fast cafes and that
was continued in the heavy musk-laden air of certain parlours amid the
rustle of heavy silks.

Slowly the fascination of this thing grew upon him until it mounted to a
veritable passion. His strong artist's imagination began to be filled
with a world of charming sensuous pictures.

He commenced to chafe under his innate respect and deference for women,
to resent and to despise it. As the desire of vice, the blind, reckless
desire of the male, grew upon him, he set himself to destroy this
barrier that had so long stood in his way. He knew that it was the
wilful and deliberate corruption of part of that which was best in him;
he was sorry for it, but persevered, nevertheless, ashamed of his
old-time timidity, his ignorance, his boyish purity.

For a second time the animal in him, the perverse evil brute, awoke and
stirred. The idea of resistance hardly occurred to Vandover; it would be
hard, it would be disagreeable to resist, and Vandover had not
accustomed himself to the performance of hard, disagreeable duties. They
were among the unpleasant things that he shirked. He told himself that
later on, when he had grown older and steadier and had profited by
experience and knowledge of the world, when he was stronger, in a word,
he would curb the thing and restrain it. He saw no danger in such a
course. It was what other men did with impunity.

In company with Geary and young Haight he had come to frequent a certain
one of the fast cafes of the city. Here he met and became acquainted
with a girl called Flossie. It was the opportunity for which he was
waiting, and he seized it at once.

This time there was no recoil of conscience, no shame, no remorse; he
even felt a better estimation of himself, that self-respect that comes
with wider experiences and with larger views of life. He told himself
that all men should at one time see certain phases of the world; it
rounded out one's life. After all, one had to be a man of the world.
Those men only were perverted who allowed themselves to be corrupted by
such vice.

Thus it was that Vandover, by degrees, drifted into the life of a
certain class of the young men of the city. Vice had no hold on him. The
brute had grown larger in him, but he knew that he had the creature in
hand. He was its master, and only on rare occasions did he permit
himself to gratify its demands, feeding its abominable hunger from that
part of him which he knew to be t