Virgins? Sure, you met virgins too. But it was all shoddy and pawed over and second-hand. They’d talk of not staying out late and being afraid of the landlady, and of marrying and buying furniture; and on the third Sunday you had ’em as well trained as poodle dogs. And anyhow, you never knew who’d stirred your soup before you. It was all doubtful, and you had no proper belief in it. Even if sometimes you met a better sort, it wasn’t never the best. They’d be coy and kittenish, and there was no naturalness and no honesty. First you had to lie to ’em and make ’em tame, and then when they got scared about being in trouble, they chilled and disgusted you so, you’d like to kill them. Sailors who had been on long voyages had told him that they got so sick of the salt-meat and the pickled meat that when they landed and happened to meet a lamb or a rabbit, they felt as if they could tear the living animal limb from limb and devour the warm, fresh flesh. That’s what could happen to a man with women; that’s what had happened to him when he’d seen the Jewess. The sight of her had gone through and through him. It had pierced him as a red-hot iron will slide through ice. It had whirled him around; all his life he hadn’t had no such sensation--as if the lightning had struck him or he’d been bewitched or had drunk a gallon of alcohol. From that moment he had had a twitching in his fingers as though velvet was passing over them; he had felt a terrible avidity to touch something that moves and trembles and is warm, an avidity for the terror of those eyes and her wonderful struggles, as the depth of her soul made moan, and she wept and begged. How she walked in her inviolateness and pride, as in a haze! One wanted to lie down and have her step on one’s chest, and look up at her as at a slender column. Jesus and all the Saints! That had done for him and been the end of him! He knew he’d have to have her, if it cost him his eternal weal, which nobody gives a damn for anyhow. He knew from the start, of course, that a being like that wasn’t for the like of him. She was like the sacrament that no one could touch but the priest. He had known that; but there was more to it than that from the start. From the start it had been a matter of life and death. There’d been no doubt about that in him at any time: she’d have to die for him--him! He had lain in wait for her, and she had fled like a deer. It had made him laugh. “You’ll come into my net,” he had said, and had fixed his eyes and thoughts on her day and night, so that she didn’t know no more what to do. She had appeared to him in vision, yes, appeared to him whenever he’d commanded her, and begged him to let her off. And he’d told her that was impossible, that she must come to him, that her body and blood must become his, and that he must make an end of her. Unless he did, there wasn’t no peace on earth for him nor for her either.