Kraus had an aunt who was a musician and a singer. She sang so sweetly that Bennett was moved to tears and fell violently in love with her, though he would not admit it to himself, for all thought of love disgusted him. It was Kraus who revealed to Bennett the mystery of his birth, and in the filthiest way possible explained to him the process by which he had his being. It took Bennett some time to recover from the despair into which the revelation threw him, but it never occurred to him to doubt the truth of his friend's statements. The filthiness was in the world and not in Kraus. They became more intimate, and their talk was almost always dirty, though innocent. It was a swaggering pose, their way of equalising matters with the bawdiness of the world that lay before them. Bennett had no corrective. No grown person ever held out a hand to save him from his dark thoughts and uneasy desires when they came to him, nor troubled to enquire into what pitfalls he might be tumbling. Instructed by Kraus he went the way of all flesh and lost his peace of mind and the bloom of his boyhood. All around him he saw darkness and ugliness, but never any beauty. The one place in his daily walks that his imagination fastened on was the gaol, and he dreamed of prisoners and policemen and arrestments. His friendship with Kraus lasted for three years, during which Bennett fell in and out of love (with absurd chivalry and nobility) with his sisters' friends. The rupture came when one day Kraus filled the whole of their walk home with an account--largely invented--of an adventure with a loose factory girl whom he had encountered in the street seeking whom she might devour. A black abyss yawned at Bennett's feet, his brain whirled, and he said: "You'll go to Hell." Kraus replied with an obscene jingle which they had often chanted together, and offered to call for Bennett that night. "I don't ever want to see you again," said Bennett, and he washed his hands of Kraus. Thereafter for the short remaining period of his term at school he avoided the Jewish quarter and took the high road through the most respectable-seeming middle-class streets.