t, crying out against him,
protesting for the last time against its own perversion and destruction.
Vandover felt that he was at the great crisis of his life.

After all was over he walked home through the silent streets, proceeding
slowly, his hands in his pockets, his head bent down, his mind very
busy. Once in his rooms he threw off his things and, having stirred up
the drowsing fire in the tiled stove, sat down before it in his
shirt-sleeves, the bosom of his full dress shirt bulging from his vest
and faintly creaking as from time to time he drew a long breath. He had
been lured into a mood where he was himself at his very best, where the
other Vandover, the better Vandover, drew apart with eyes turned
askance, looking inward and downward into the depths of his own
character, shuddering, terrified. Far down there in the darkest, lowest
places he had seen the brute, squat, deformed, hideous; he had seen it
crawling to and fro dimly, through a dark shadow he had heard it
growling, chafing at the least restraint, restless to be free. For now
at last it was huge, strong, insatiable, swollen and distorted out of
all size, grown to be a monster, glutted yet still ravenous, some
fearful bestial satyr, grovelling, perverse, horrible beyond words.

And with the eyes of this better self he saw again, little by little,
the course of his whole life, and witnessed again the eternal struggle
between good and evil that had been going on within him since his very
earliest years. He was sure that at the first the good had been the
strongest. Little by little the brute had grown, and he,
pleasure-loving, adapting himself to every change of environment,
luxurious, self-indulgent, shrinking with the shrinking of a sensuous
artist-nature from all that was irksome and disagreeable, had shut his
ears to the voices that shouted warnings of the danger, and had allowed
the brute to thrive and to grow, its abominable famine gorged from the
store of that in him which he felt to be the purest, the cleanest, and
the best, its bulk fattened upon the rot and the decay of all that was
good, growing larger day by day, noisome, swollen, poddy, a filthy
inordinate ghoul, gorged and bloated by feeding on the good things that
were dead.

Besides this he saw how one by one he had wrenched himself free from all
those influences that had tended to foster and to cultivate all the
better part of him.

First of all, long ago it seemed now, he had allowed