atomical differences between men and women. He read
about the mechanism of love. He read about the mysteries of procreation.
All of it was startlingly new to him, and yet he read with a sense of
always having known it. He read with absolute acceptance, without a
possibility of doubt.

It seemed a genuine revelation that must render all future questioning
futile. And yet he seemed to know no more when he had finished than he
knew before he started. It remained outside of himself, a structure of
air, a series of shadowgraphs, and the craving within him burned as
passionately as ever.

From now on he could grasp the points of the stories told by the boys at
school, and he would know what Johan was hinting at in his boast about
the secret doings of that attic. But of the reality of the thing he knew
as little as before. In fact, the principal lesson brought home by his
reading was that here he found himself in the presence of something that
could not be learned out of books.

To begin with he did not go beyond the first part of the book. This he
read over and over again. When at last he was sated with what that part
had to give, a subtle chemical change had taken place in his mental
make-up, one might say. It was not caused by any facts conveyed by the
book. These seemed quite natural to him, and in themselves they would
have had no more power over him than the information about flowers of
various kinds imparted by the teacher of botany. It was the tone used
that affected him in a manner reminding him of the Swedish Punch of
which he had tested a few drops now and then. In every line there was a
mixture of shamefaced apology and veiled desire that sent all the blood
in his body rushing toward his head until the walls of the room about
him reeled. Every inch of him was on fire, and in that flame body and
soul were consumed together.

The sum and substance of it was that he had become conscious of that
multitudinous impulse we call sex, and that from a vague, restless
yearning this impulse suddenly had developed into an appetite as
imperative as any hunger for food.

VIII

Finally he went on to the remaining chapters of the book, always with
that double sense of knowing it all before and of not quite grasping
what he read.

Pages were consumed before he realized with a shock more intense than
any one previously experienced, that the book was speaking of the game
he learned to play back of the big rock.

Again i