to his room, and put the muzzle into his mouth, and set off the trigger with his foot.  In the letter he told me what was the matter—­he had got into trouble with a woman of the town, and had caught syphilis.  He had gone away and tried to get cured, but had fallen into the hands of a quack, who had taken all his money and left his health worse than ever, so in despair and shame the poor boy had shot his head off.

I paused, uncertain if Sylvia would understand the story.  “Do you know what syphilis is?” I asked.

“I suppose—­I have heard of what we call a ‘bad disease’” she said.

“It’s a very bad disease.  But if the words convey to you that it’s a disease that bad people get, I should tell you that most men take the chance of getting it; yet they are cruel enough to despise those upon whom the ill-luck falls.  My poor nephew had been utterly ignorant—­I found out that from his father, too late.  An instinct had awakened in him of which he knew absolutely nothing; his companions had taught him what it meant, and he had followed their lead.  And then had come the horror and the shame—­and some vile, ignorant wretch to trade upon it, and cast the boy off when he was penniless.  So he had come home again, with his gnawing secret; I pictured him wandering about, trying to make up his mind to confide in me, wavering between that and the horrible deed he did.”

I stopped, because even to this day I cannot tell the story without tears.  I cannot keep a picture of the boy in my room, because of the self-reproaches that haunt me.  “You can understand,” I said to Sylvia, “I never could forget such a lesson.  I swore a vow over the poor lad’s body, that I would never let a boy or girl that I could reach go out in ignorance into the world.  I read up on the subject, and for a while I was a sort of fanatic—­I made people talk, young people and old people.  I broke down the taboos wherever I went, and while I shocked a good many, I knew that I helped a good many more.”

All that was, of course, inconceivable to Sylvia.  How curious was the contrast of her one experience in the matter of venereal disease.  She told me how she had been instrumental in making a match between her friend, Harriet Atkinson and a young scion of an ancient and haughty family of Charleston, and how after the marriage her friend’s health had begun to give way, until now she was an utter wreck, living alone in a dilapidated antebellum mansion, seeing no one but negro servants, and praying for death to relieve her of her misery.

“Of course, I don’t really know,” said Sylvia.  “Perhaps it was this—­this disease that you speak of.  None of my people would tell me—­I doubt if they really know themselves.  It was just before my own wedding, so you can understand it had a painful effect upon me.  It happened that I read something in a magazine, and I thought that—­that possibly my fiancée—­that someone ought to ask him, you understand—­”