Thus on this May morning Basine was able to grasp the enormity of his offense and to apologize whole-heartedly for its commission and simultaneously to enjoy the memory of it. He had come away from Madam Minnie's with an egoistic impression of his prowess and with the self-satisfaction which comes of the knowledge of having cheated the devil out of his due by his careful method. He remembered with a warmth in his throat as if he were recalling something beautiful how the creature had looked at the first moment she stood before him. He had spent the earlier part of the night getting creditably drunk. Lured into a brothel by a woman with a hard, childish face, he had devoted himself for several hours to the despicable business of sin. The sordid make-believe of passion had pleased him vastly. He had managed in fact to achieve an observation on life. As the night waned he had grown philosophical and thought, how with good women one began with personal talk, with an exchange of confidences. One began with emotions, with gentle lacerations, wistfulness, sadness. And one progressed from these toward the intimacy of physical contact. But with bad women one began with the intimacy of physical contact. Only the abrupt matter-of-fact tone of the thing robbed the contact of all intimacy. And one progressed from this contact toward a wistfulness, a gentle shyness and finally an exchange of confidences and personal talk. This last contained in it the thrill of intimacy. A good woman surrendered her body and inspired thereby a sense of possession. A bad woman surrendered the secret of her birthplace and of her real name and inspired a similar sense. There was also obvious the fact that the same sense of dramatic coquetry, idealism, modesty or whatever it was that induced the good woman to withhold her body induced the bad woman to withhold her confidence. Under the influence of this knowledge, Basine had pursued the usual tactics of the predatory male and, as a fillip to the unimaginative excitements of the night, obtained from his accomplice in sin the story of her life. "The mystery of a bad woman is that she was once virtuous," he thought as he fell asleep. "Just as the mystery of a virtuous woman is that she could be bad." An hour later he awoke and with a thrill of quixotic honesty placed five dollars in the moist hand of the sleeping houri, gathered his friend Keegan out of an adjoining room and emerged once more into the world with a clear head, a body full of elated memories and a laudable conviction that he had done wrong, but that what happened yesterday was not a part of today and that a man can grant himself absolution from sin as easily as he can lay aside virtue.