When Boris was about nine years old, he was sent to school at Warsaw. He there made friends with a schoolfellow one or two years older than himself--one Baptistin Kraft, who initiated him into certain clandestine practices, which the children in their ignorance and astonishment believed to be “magic.” This is the name they bestowed upon their vice, from having heard or read that magic enables one in some mysterious way to gain possession of what one wishes for, that it gives unlimited powers and so forth.... They believed in all good faith that they had discovered a secret which made up for real absence by illusory presence, and they freely put themselves in a state of hallucination and ecstasy, gloating over an empty void, which their heated imagination, stimulated by their desire for pleasure, filled to overflowing with marvels. Needless to say, Sophroniska did not make use of these terms; I should have liked her to repeat exactly what Boris said, but she declares she only succeeded in making out the above--though she certified its accuracy--through a tangle of pretences, reticence and vagueness. “I have at last found out the explanation of something I have been trying to discover for a long time past,” she added, “--of a bit of parchment which Boris used always to wear hanging round his neck in a little sachet, along with the religious medallions his mother forces him to wear. There were six words on it, written in capital letters in a childish, painstaking hand--six words whose meaning he never would tell me. “GAS. TELEPHONE ... ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND ROUBLES “‘But it means nothing--it’s magic,’ he used always to answer whenever I pressed him. That was all I could get out of him. I know now that these enigmatic words are in young Baptistin’s handwriting--the grand master and professor of magic--and that these six words were the boys’ formula of incantation--the ‘Open Sesame’ of the shameful Paradise, into which their pleasure plunged them. Boris called this bit of parchment, his _talisman_. I had great difficulty in persuading him to let me see it and still greater in persuading him to give it up (it was at the beginning of our stay here); for I wanted him to give it up, as I know now that he had already given up his bad habits. I had hopes that the tics and manias from which he suffers would disappear with the _talisman_. But he clung to it and his illness clung to it as to a last refuge.” “But you said he had already given up his bad habits....” “His nervous illness only began after that. It arose no doubt from the constraint Boris was obliged to exercise in order to get free from them. I have just learnt from him that his mother caught him one day in the act of ‘doing magic,’ as he says. Why did she never tell me?... out of false shame?...” “And no doubt because she knew he was cured.” “Absurd!... And that is why I have been in the dark so long. I told you that I thought Boris was perfectly pure.”