All the women liked my father. He dressed neatly and well. His trousers were never without their fresh crease. He was very vain of his neat appearance, even to the wearing of a fresh-cut flower in his buttonhole. This vanity made him also wear his derby indoors and out, because of his entirely bald head. Every time he could devise an excuse for going to the departments where the women worked, he would do so, and flirt with them. He, for this reason I am sure, made special friends with Schlegel, foreman of the collar department. I never saw a man derive a keener pleasure out of just standing and talking with women. Though, like most men, he enjoyed a smutty story, yet I never heard him say a really gross thing about any woman. And his language was always in good English, with few curses and oaths in it. * * * * * Our new place was a bit of heaven to me. I procured a copy of Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_, of Darwin's _Origin of Species_ and _Descent of Man_. Laboriously I delved through these last two books, my knowledge of elementary zoology helping me to the explication of their meaning. The theory of evolution came as a natural thing to me. It seemed that I knew it all, before,--as I did, because, in my own way, I had thought out the problem of the growth of the varying forms of animal life, exactly to the Darwinian conclusion. Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_ became my Bible. * * * * * It was at this time that I made the harrowing discovery that I had been working evil on myself ... through an advertisement of a quack in a daily paper. And now I became an anchorite battling to save myself from the newly discovered monstrosity of the flesh.... For several days I would be the victor, but the thing I hugged to my bosom would finally win. Then would follow a terror beyond comprehension, a horror of remorse and degradation that human nature seemed too frail to bear. I grew thinner still. I fell into a hacking cough. And, at the same time, I became more perverse in my affectation of innocence and purity--saying always to my father that I never could care for girls, and that what people married for was beyond my comprehension. Thus I threw his alarmed inquisitiveness off the track.... I procured books about sexual life. My most cherished volume was an old family medical book with charred covers, smelling of smoke and water, that I had dug out of the ruins of a neighbouring fire. In the book was a picture of a nude woman, entitled _The Female Form Divine_. I tore this from the body of the book and kept it under my pillow. I would draw it forth, press it against myself, speak soft words of affection to it, caress and kiss it, fix my mind on it as if it were a living presence. Often the grey light of dawn would put its ashen hand across my sunken cheeks before dead-heavy, exhausted sleep proved kind to me.... * * * * *