Here was Warner, a man of twenty-four, and of a devout, if somewhat dull and plodding conscientiousness; and the last eight or nine years of his’ life had been one torment because of the cravings of lust. He had never committed an act of unchastity--or at least he told Thyrsis that he had not. But he was never free from the impulse, and he had no conception of the possibility of being free. His desire was a purely brute one--untouched by any intellectual or spiritual, or even any sentimental color. He desired woman, as woman--it mattered not what woman. How low his impulses took him Thyrsis realized with a shudder from one remark that he made--that his poverty did not help him to live virtuously, for about the docks and in the workingmen’s quarters there were women who would sell themselves for fifty cents a night. This man’s whole life was determined by that craving; in fact it seemed to Thyrsis that his God had made the universe with relation to it--a heaven to reward him if he abstained, and a hell to punish him if he yielded. It was because of this that he clung to the church, and shrunk from any dallying with “rationalism”. He disapproved of the theatre, because it appealed to these cravings; he disapproved of all pictures and statues of the nude human form, because the sight of them overmastered him. For the same reason he shrunk from all impassioned poetry, and from dancing, and even from non-religious music. He was rigid in his conformance to all the social conventions, because they served the purpose of saving him and his young women-friends from temptation; and he looked forward to the completion of a divinity-course as his goal, because then he would be able to settle down and marry, and so at last to gratify his desires. He stated this quite baldly, quoting the authority of St. Paul, that it was “better to marry than to burn.” This conversation brought Thyrsis to a realization that there was a great deal in the world that was not found in the poetry of Tennyson and Longfellow; and so he began to pry into the souls of others of his fellow-students.