Summary

Luke is lecturing his friend Spencer on the merits of pain and pleasure not as opposite poles. Spencer is Luke’s longtime friend from university and is everything opposite of Luke: tall, wealthy, shy and fair. Because Luke is Spencer’s only friend, he is thought of “as the Imp’s good conscious” (31). Luke continues his lecture on pain and Spencer zones out, recalling their first meeting: Luke was brilliant and intellectually ahead of his tutors in theory and understanding, while Spencer was wealthy but limited in his own intelligence and thought it best to avoid Luke. One day however, Spencer ran into Luke in the lab quite late and discovered that Luke had cut a portion of the lining of the human stomach, injected it with ink and placed it between two glass slides so that it looked like a piece...