ng tiger-cub, wayward,
and passionate, and absolutely uncontrolled. And he gave in to others,
and was guided by them, in one point only, and that was in their
extravagant admiration of himself. For finding others worship him, he
fell in with their opinion, and followed their example: and became as it
were the devotee at the shrine of his own beauty, making it a deity to
which every other thing or body was only fitted to be sacrificed. And he
filled his rooms with mirrors of many colours, made of crystal and
lapiz-lazuli, and polished gold and silver, and the water of tanks whose
slabs were of marble of every variety of hue; and he used to sit alone,
when he had nothing else to do, for hours, watching his own image that
seemed to offer him reciprocally worship as he watched it, as if it were
doubtful which of the two, the reality or its reflection, was the deity,
and which the devotee.

And gradually the world with all its objects came to appear in his eyes
as nothing but a playground, and all its men and women merely his own
animated toys. And from being utterly indifferent to everything but his
own momentary pleasure and caprice, he became, little by little, first
callous to the sufferings of others, and finally positively cruel,
finding his amusement in making others victims to his own peremptory
desires. And his appetite, like a fire, grew with the fuel that it fed
upon, till it resembled voracity, and an intolerable thirst for more.
But as long as he remained still a child, the fire, remaining as it were
without its proper aliment, lay hidden: till he grew into a man. And
then, all at once, it blazed out furiously like a very conflagration,
striking terror into all the subjects of the kingdom, and threatening to
consume them all, like forest trees and grass.

For whereas, till then, the fury of his self-will had been scattered,
for want of concentration[19] on one object only, manhood, like a flash
of lightning, suddenly revealed to him that very object, in the form of
woman: and he discovered, in the storm of his delight, that women were
the very victims for whom he had been blindly groping in the darkness
all his life. And he threw himself upon them, like a prey, finding with
intoxication that the Creator had framed him as a weapon constructed
wholly for their destruction. And he said to himself, in triumph: I am,
as it seems, a magnetic gem, omnipotent and irresistible, to whose
attraction the entire sex succumb