At length one day he heard the terse and brutal truth.  In an instant he believed it, some lower, animal intuition in him reiterating and confirming the fact.  But even then he hated to think that people were so low, so vile.  One day, however, he was looking through the volumes of the old Encyclopaedia Britannica in his father’s library, hoping that he might find a dollar bill which the Old Gentleman told him had been at one time misplaced between the leaves of some one of the great tomes.  All at once he came upon the long article “Obstetrics,” profusely illustrated with old-fashioned plates and steel engravings.  He read it from beginning to end.

It was the end of all his childish ideals, the destruction of all his first illusions.  The whole of his rude little standard of morality was lowered immediately.  Even his mother, whom he had always believed to be some kind of an angel, fell at once in his estimation.  She could never be the same to him after this, never so sweet, so good and so pure as he had hitherto imagined her.

It was very cruel, the whole thing was a grief to him, a blow, a great shock; he hated to think of it.  Then little by little the first taint crept in, the innate vice stirred in him, the brute began to make itself felt, and a multitude of perverse and vicious ideas commenced to buzz about him like a swarm of nasty flies.

A certain word, the blunt Anglo-Saxon name for a lost woman, that he heard on one occasion among the boys at school, opened to him a vista of incredible wickedness, but now after the first moment of revolt the thing began to seem less horrible.  There was even a certain attraction about it.  Vandover soon became filled with an overwhelming curiosity, the eager evil curiosity of the schoolboy, the perverse craving for the knowledge of vice.  He listened with all his ears to everything that was said and went about through the great city with eyes open only to its foulness.  He even looked up in the dictionary the meanings of the new words, finding in the cold, scientific definitions some strange sort of satisfaction.

There was no feminine influence about Vandover at this critical time to help him see the world in the right light and to gauge things correctly, and he might have been totally corrupted while in his earliest teens had it not been for another side of his character that began to develop about the same time.

This was his artistic side.  He seemed to be a born artist.  At first he only showed bent for all general art.  He drew well, he made curious little modellings in clayey mud; he had a capital ear for music and managed in some unknown way of his own to pick out certain tunes on the piano.  At one time he gave evidence of a genuine talent for the stage.  For days he would pretend to be some dreadful sort of character, he did not know whom, talking to himself, stamping and shaking his fists; then he would dress himself in an old smoking-cap, a red table-cloth and