ith them. He, for this
reason I am sure, made special friends with Schlegel, foreman of the
collar department. I never saw a man derive a keener pleasure out of
just standing and talking with women.

Though, like most men, he enjoyed a smutty story, yet I never heard him
say a really gross thing about any woman. And his language was always in
good English, with few curses and oaths in it.

* * * * *

Our new place was a bit of heaven to me. I procured a copy of Whitman's
_Leaves of Grass_, of Darwin's _Origin of Species_ and _Descent of Man_.
Laboriously I delved through these last two books, my knowledge of
elementary zoology helping me to the explication of their meaning.

The theory of evolution came as a natural thing to me. It seemed that I
knew it all, before,--as I did, because, in my own way, I had thought
out the problem of the growth of the varying forms of animal life,
exactly to the Darwinian conclusion.

Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_ became my Bible.

* * * * *

It was at this time that I made the harrowing discovery that I had been
working evil on myself ... through an advertisement of a quack in a
daily paper.

And now I became an anchorite battling to save myself from the newly
discovered monstrosity of the flesh.... For several days I would be the
victor, but the thing I hugged to my bosom would finally win. Then would
follow a terror beyond comprehension, a horror of remorse and
degradation that human nature seemed too frail to bear. I grew thinner
still. I fell into a hacking cough.

And, at the same time, I became more perverse in my affectation of
innocence and purity--saying always to my father that I never could care
for girls, and that what people married for was beyond my comprehension.
Thus I threw his alarmed inquisitiveness off the track....

I procured books about sexual life. My most cherished volume was an old
family medical book with charred covers, smelling of smoke and water,
that I had dug out of the ruins of a neighbouring fire.

In the book was a picture of a nude woman, entitled _The Female Form
Divine_. I tore this from the body of the book and kept it under my
pillow.

I would draw it forth, press it against myself, speak soft words of
affection to it, caress and kiss it, fix my mind on it as if it were a
living presence. Often the grey light of dawn would put its ashen hand
across my sunken cheeks before d