Vandover’s love for his art was keen.  On the whole he kept pretty steadily to his work, spending a good six hours at his easel every day, very absorbed over the picture in hand.  He was working up into large canvases the sketches he had made along the Maine coast, great, empty expanses of sea, sky, and sand-dune, full of wind and sun.  They were really admirable.  He even sold one of them.  The Old Gentleman was delighted, signed him a check for twenty dollars, and told him that in three years he could afford to send him abroad.

In the meanwhile Vandover set himself to enjoy the new life.  Little by little his “set” formed around him; Geary and young Haight, of course, and some half dozen young men of the city:  young lawyers, medical students, and clerks in insurance offices.  As Vandover thus began to see the different phases of that life which lay beyond the limits of the college, he perceived more and more clearly that he was an exception among men for his temperance, his purity, and his clean living.

At their clubs and in their smoking-rooms he heard certain practices, which he had always believed to be degrading and abominable, discussed with shouts of laughter.  Those matters which until now he had regarded with an almost sacred veneration were subjects for immense jokes.  A few years ago he would have been horrified at it all, but the fine quality of this first sensitiveness had been blunted since his experience at college.  He tolerated these things in his friends now.

Gradually Vandover allowed his ideas and tastes to be moulded by this new order of things.  He assumed the manners of these young men of the city, very curious to see for himself the other lower side of their life that began after midnight in the private rooms of fast cafes and that was continued in the heavy musk-laden air of certain parlours amid the rustle of heavy silks.

Slowly the fascination of this thing grew upon him until it mounted to a veritable passion.  His strong artist’s imagination began to be filled with a world of charming sensuous pictures.

He commenced to chafe under his innate respect and deference for women, to resent and to despise it.  As the desire of vice, the blind, reckless desire of the male, grew upon him, he set himself to destroy this barrier that had so long stood in his way.  He knew that it was the wilful and deliberate corruption of part of that which was best in him; he was sorry for it, but persevered, nevertheless, ashamed of his old-time timidity, his ignorance, his boyish purity.

For a second time the animal in him, the perverse evil brute, awoke and stirred.  The idea of resistance hardly occurred to Vandover; it would be hard, it would be disagreeable to resist, and Vandover had not accustomed himself to the performance of hard, disagreeable duties.  They were among the unpleasant things that he shirked.  He told himself that later on, when he had grown older and steadier and had profited by experience and knowledge of the world, when he was stronger, in a word, he would curb the thing and restrain it.  He saw no danger in such a course.  It was what other men did with impunity.