A long cherished opportunity had arrived at last, and he made straight for the book case.  It was locked, but he knew where to find the key.  Its hiding-place had constituted one of those little domestic problems that add zest to an uneventful existence.  There was also an injunction of long standing against any meddling with the case without permission, but that had been a dead letter for some time.  When books were concerned, Keith’s customary respect for authority ceased to be an obstacle to his desires.

He explored with no special object in mind.  He wanted new reading matter, and his curiosity was piqued by a number of books with blank backs that gave no clue to their contents.  Two huge, fat volumes on the bottom shelf had already attracted his attention, and they were the first he pulled out.  Their title brought instantaneous disappointment—­“The Philosophy of the Unconscious,” by Edouard von Hartmann.  He prepared scornfully to put them back, when, through the big gap left by their withdrawal, he became aware that the space back of the front row was packed with smaller books and pamphlets.  This discovery surprised him for a moment, but what he saw in there looked rather uninteresting.  Nevertheless he reached in and pulled out a small green pamphlet that happened to be nearest at hand.  Idly he glanced at the legend printed on the front cover: 

“Amor and Hymen.  A guide for married and unmarried persons of both sexes.”

The words carried no special meaning to his mind, and in the same indifferent manner he turned a few pages until his eyes fell on a full-page illustration.

After that he read no other book for days.

VII

He read as he had never read before in his brief span of life—­as, perhaps, he would never read again, no matter how wide a stretch of life that span might ultimately encompass.

He read of the anatomical differences between men and women.  He read about the mechanism of love.  He read about the mysteries of procreation.  All of it was startlingly new to him, and yet he read with a sense of always having known it.  He read with absolute acceptance, without a possibility of doubt.

It seemed a genuine revelation that must render all future questioning futile.  And yet he seemed to know no more when he had finished than he knew before he started.  It remained outside of himself, a structure of air, a series of shadowgraphs, and the craving within him burned as passionately as ever.

From now on he could grasp the points of the stories told by the boys at school, and he would know what Johan was hinting at in his boast about the secret doings of that attic.  But of the reality of the thing he knew as little as before.  In fact, the principal lesson brought home by his reading was that here he found himself in the presence of something that could not be learned out of books.