, 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 welled up within me an intense sympathy and pity.
By an instinctive process somehow linked with other ex