Within a month after his entry of the High School he had a nickname.  The boys called him “Skinny-seldom-fed,” to his infinite humiliation.

Little by little the crude virility of the young man began to develop in him.  It was a distressing, uncanny period.  Had Vandover been a girl he would at this time have been subject to all sorts of abnormal vagaries, such as eating his slate pencil, nibbling bits of chalk, wishing he were dead, and drifting into states of unreasoned melancholy.  As it was, his voice began to change, a little golden down appeared on his cheeks and upon the nape of his neck, while his first summer vacation was altogether spoiled by a long spell of mumps.

His appetite was enormous.  He ate heavy meat three times a day, but took little or no exercise.  The pimples on his face became worse and worse.  He grew peevish and nervous.  He hated girls, and when in their society was a very bull-calf for bashfulness and awkward self-consciousness.  At times the strangest and most morbid fancies took possession of him, chief of which was that every one was looking at him while he was walking in the street.

Vandover was a good little boy.  Every night he said his prayers, going down upon his huge knees at the side of his bed.  To the Lord’s Prayer he added various petitions of his own.  He prayed that he might be a good boy and live a long time and go to Heaven when he died and see his mother; that the next Saturday might be sunny all day long, and that the end of the world might not come while he was alive.

It was during Vandover’s first year at the High School that his eyes were opened and that he acquired the knowledge of good and evil.  Till very late he kept his innocence, the crude raw innocence of the boy, like that of a young animal, at once charming and absurd.  But by and by he became very curious, stirred with a blind unreasoned instinct.  In the Bible which he read Sunday afternoons, because his father gave him a quarter for doing so, he came across a great many things that filled him with vague and strange ideas; and one Sunday at church, when the minister was intoning the Litany, he remarked for the first time the words, “all women in the perils of child-birth.”

He puzzled over this for a long time, smelling out a mystery beneath the words, feeling the presence of something hidden, with the instinct of a young brute.  He could get no satisfaction from his father and by and by began to be ashamed to ask him; why, he did not know.  Although he could not help hearing the abominable talk of the High School boys, he at first refused to believe that part of it which he could understand.  For all that he was ashamed of his innocence and ignorance and affected to appreciate their stories nevertheless.