Yet, in the midst of the turbidness of adolescence, I was still two distinct personalities.  With my underground library of filth hidden away where my father could not find it, at the same time I kept and read my other books.  The first were for the moments of madness and curious ecstasy I had learned how to induce.

But my better self periodically revolted.  And I took oath that I would never again spew a filthy expression from my mouth or do an ill thing.  I suffered all the agonies of the damned in hell.  I believe hell to be the invention of adolescence.

Always, inevitably, I returned to my wallow and the gang.

* * * * *

We were not always loafing in front of the undertaker’s shop.  Sometimes we were quite active.  Many windows and street lamps were smashed.  And we derived great joy from being pursued by the “cops”—­especially by a certain fat one, for whom we made life a continual burden.

Once we went in a body to the outskirts of the town and stoned a greenhouse.  Its owner chased us across ploughed fields.  We flung stones back at him.  One hit him with a dull thud and made him cry out with pain, and he left off pursuing us.  It was so dark we could not be identified.

One of our favourite diversions was to follow mature lovers as they strolled a-field, hoping to catch them in the midst of intimate endearments.

* * * * *

My father received a raise of a few dollars in salary.  As it was they paid him too little, because he was easy-going.  The additional weekly money warranted our leaving the Jenkinses and renting four rooms all our own, over the main street.  This meant that I was to have a whole room to myself, and I was glad ... a whole room where I could stand a small writing desk and set up my books in rows.  With an extreme effort I burned my underground books.

* * * * *

All the women liked my father.  He dressed neatly and well.  His trousers were never without their fresh crease.  He was very vain of his neat appearance, even to the wearing of a fresh-cut flower in his buttonhole.  This vanity made him also wear his derby indoors and out, because of his entirely bald head.

Every time he could devise an excuse for going to the departments where the women worked, he would do so, and flirt with them.  He, for this reason I am sure, made special friends with Schlegel, foreman of the collar department.  I never saw a man derive a keener pleasure out of just standing and talking with women.

Though, like most men, he enjoyed a smutty story, yet I never heard him say a really gross thing about any woman.  And his language was always in good English, with few curses and oaths in it.

* * * * *

Our new place was a bit of heaven to me.  I procured a copy of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, of Darwin’s Origin of Species and Descent of Man.  Laboriously I delved through these last two books, my knowledge of elementary zoology helping me to the explication of their meaning.