I listened shudderingly.

“But,” I cried, “they were both married!”

“What difference does that make when you love a woman?” Alec replied grandly.  “I could tell you much worse things than that.”

This he proceeded to do.  Fascinated, I listened with a sickening sensation.  It was a mild afternoon in spring, and we stood in the deep limestone gutter in front of the parsonage, a little Gothic wooden house set in a gloomy yard.

“I thought,” said I, “that people couldn’t love any more after they were married, except each other.”

Alec looked at me pityingly.

“You’ll get over that notion,” he assured me.

Thus another ingredient entered my character.  Denied its food at home, good food, my soul eagerly consumed and made part of itself the fermenting stuff that Alec Pound so willing distributed.  And it was fermenting stuff.  Let us see what it did to me.  Working slowly but surely, it changed for me the dawning mystery of sex into an evil instead of a holy one.  The knowledge of the tragedy of Grace Hollister started me to seeking restlessly, on bookshelves and elsewhere, for a secret that forever eluded me, and forever led me on.  The word fermenting aptly describes the process begun, suggesting as it does something closed up, away from air and sunlight, continually working in secret, engendering forces that fascinated, yet inspired me with fear.  Undoubtedly this secretiveness of our elders was due to the pernicious dualism of their orthodox Christianity, in which love was carnal and therefore evil, and the flesh not the gracious soil of the spirit, but something to be deplored and condemned, exorcised and transformed by the miracle of grace.  Now love had become a terrible power (gripping me) whose enchantment drove men and women from home and friends and kindred to the uttermost parts of the earth....

It was long before I got to sleep that night after my talk with Alec Pound.  I alternated between the horror and the romance of the story I had heard, supplying for myself the details he had omitted:  I beheld the signals from the windows, the clandestine meetings, the sudden and desperate flight.  And to think that all this could have happened in our city not five blocks from where I lay!

My consternation and horror were concentrated on the man,—­and yet I recall a curious bifurcation.  Instead of experiencing that automatic righteous indignation which my father and mother had felt, which had animated old Mr. Jules Hollister when he had sternly forbidden his daughter’s name to be mentioned in his presence, which had made these people outcasts, there welled up within me an intense sympathy and pity.  By an instinctive process somehow linked with other experiences, I seemed to be able to enter into the feelings of these two outcasts, to understand the fearful yet fascinating nature of the impulse that had led them to elude the vigilance and probity of a world with