He thought of men like Zola who saw this side of life clearly and how he, as a young fellow in the city, had read the man at Janet Eberly’s suggestion and had been helped by him--helped and frightened and made to see. And then there rose before him the leering face of a keeper of a second-hand book store in Cleveland who some weeks before had pushed across the counter to him a paper-covered copy of “Nana’s Brother,” saying with a smirk, “That’s some sporty stuff.” And he wondered what he should have thought had he bought the book to feed the imagination the bookseller’s comment was intended to arouse. In the small towns through which Sam walked and in the small town in which he grew to manhood vice was openly crude and masculine. It went to sleep sprawling across a dirty beer-soaked table in Art Sherman’s saloon in Piety Hollow, and the newsboy passed it without comment, regretting that it slept and that it had no money with which to buy papers. “Dissipation and vice get into the life of youth,” he thought, coming to a street corner where young men played pool and smoked cigarettes in a dingy poolroom, and turned back toward the heart of the city. “It gets into all modern life. The farmer boy coming up to the city to work hears lewd stories in the smoking car of the train, and the travelling men from the cities tell tales of the city streets to the group about the stove in village stores.” Sam did not quarrel with the fact that youth touched vice. Such things were a part of the world that men and women had made for their sons and daughters to live in, and that night as he wandered in the streets of Rochester he thought that he would like all youth to know, if they could but know, truth. His heart was bitter at the thought of men throwing the glamour of romance over the sordid, ugly things he had been seeing in that city and in every city he had known. Past him in a street lined with small frame houses stumbled a man far gone in drink, by whose side walked a boy, and Sam’s mind leaped back to those first years he had spent in the city and of the staggering old man he had left behind him in Caxton. “You would think no man better armed against vice and dissipation than that painter’s son of Caxton,” he reminded himself, “and yet he embraced vice. He found, as all young men find, that there is much misleading talk and writing on the subject. The business men he knew did not part with able assistance because it did not sign the pledge. Ability was too rare a thing and too independent to sign pledges, and the lips-that-touch-liquor-shall-never-touch-mine sentiment among women was reserved for the lips that did not invite.”