To begin with he did not go beyond the first part of the book.  This he read over and over again.  When at last he was sated with what that part had to give, a subtle chemical change had taken place in his mental make-up, one might say.  It was not caused by any facts conveyed by the book.  These seemed quite natural to him, and in themselves they would have had no more power over him than the information about flowers of various kinds imparted by the teacher of botany.  It was the tone used that affected him in a manner reminding him of the Swedish Punch of which he had tested a few drops now and then.  In every line there was a mixture of shamefaced apology and veiled desire that sent all the blood in his body rushing toward his head until the walls of the room about him reeled.  Every inch of him was on fire, and in that flame body and soul were consumed together.

The sum and substance of it was that he had become conscious of that multitudinous impulse we call sex, and that from a vague, restless yearning this impulse suddenly had developed into an appetite as imperative as any hunger for food.

VIII

Finally he went on to the remaining chapters of the book, always with that double sense of knowing it all before and of not quite grasping what he read.

Pages were consumed before he realized with a shock more intense than any one previously experienced, that the book was speaking of the game he learned to play back of the big rock.

Again it was not what the book told that seemed to matter, but the tone in which it spoke.  And while before that tone had sent the blood to his head, it now drew every drop of it back to his heart until he shivered and shook with a misery so acute that another moment’s endurance of it seemed unthinkable.

At that instant fear was born within him.  Until then it had been no more real to him than were now the experiences described in the first part of the book.  He had instinctively shrunk from things that he knew or believed to be painful, from the shock of a blow to the sting of a harsh word.  He had suffered discomforting anticipation of rebukes and restrictions.  But he had never before stood face to face with that stark unreasoning terror which gathers its chief power from the intangible character of the danger it heralds.

He learned that physically and spiritually he had courted death, and what is worse than death.  And suddenly the thought of that gentle-faced, sweet-tempered young man in the parlour leaped into his memory.  But the image it brought him was not that of a human form stretched stiffly within the black boards of a coffin.  What he saw and what froze him with horror was the hollow temples and sallow cheeks and drooping jaws and bent back and trembling limbs of the human wreck that was still counted a living man.

Worse than that image, however, and worse than any thought of punishment by powers not within his actual ken, was the book’s damning imputation of shame incurred, of unworthiness proved, of inferiority so deep that no words could adequately picture it.