We still shared the same bedroom, and at night he liked to talk before going to sleep. He had obtained a considerable influence over me, more than anybody else ever did or was to do, yet it is difficult to describe what it consisted in, or why it should have come about. I had an extremely poor opinion of him: I knew he had not even a rudimentary conscience: frequently he repelled, and even disgusted, me: but always, by some instinct, he seemed to know when he had done so, and he had a special gift for recovering lost ground. His influence was bad――absolutely――and yet what was so harmful to me did not, so far as I know, have any particularly disastrous effect upon George himself. He had an amazingly licentious imagination, and, in this direction, a power of vivid suggestion. As I became more accustomed to him, things that had at first jarred upon me ceased to do so; but it was doubly unfortunate that I should have been thrown so intimately into his society just at this particular time. Had I been either older or younger, or had I had any other friends, the effect would not have been so injurious. It was not that I had not heard my share of Rabelaisian talk before. This was, somehow, different. At all events, the other had passed off me easily, awakening no after-thoughts, leaving my senses untroubled. It was not so now. My mind became disturbed, and, above all, my dreams were coloured by certain obsessions which George took a delight in evoking. In my dreams his suggestions became realities, and his imagination seemed to brood over them like an evil angel. I do not think he was himself conscious of it, conscious, that is, that what for him appeared to be no more than a sort of intellectual pastime, which he could shake from him as easily as one might turn off a tap, assumed with me a darker form. His words appeared to touch me physically, and with an appalling directness and persistency. He had a trick of re-telling stories he had read, twisting them and altering them with an astonishing ingenuity, so as to introduce the element he revelled in, and he never became crude or brutal till he had carefully prepared his ground. And it was all transformed by a curious gift of humour, which was in itself something quite inimitable, consisting, as it did, largely in his personality and manner, in an unquenchable liveliness, and a faculty of mimicry. CHAPTER XXII Two months went by in this fashion, and I had begun to look forward to Christmas and to count the weeks that separated me from the holidays, when an incident occurred which was the means of my forming an acquaintance that was to develop into the most intimate friendship of my life. It befell in this way.