All the women liked my father. He dressed neatly and well. His trousers were never without their fresh crease. He was very vain of his neat appearance, even to the wearing of a fresh-cut flower in his buttonhole. This vanity made him also wear his derby indoors and out, because of his entirely bald head.
Every time he could devise an excuse for going to the departments where the women worked, he would do so, and flirt with them. He, for this reason I am sure, made special friends with Schlegel, foreman of the collar department. I never saw a man derive a keener pleasure out of just standing and talking with women.
Though, like most men, he enjoyed a smutty story, yet I never heard him say a really gross thing about any woman. And his language was always in good English, with few curses and oaths in it.
Our new place was a bit of heaven to me. I procured a copy of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, of Darwin's Origin of Species and Descent of Man. Laboriously I delved through these last two books, my knowledge of elementary zoology helping me to the explication of their meaning.
The theory of evolution came as a natural thing to me. It seemed that I knew it all, before,—as I did, because, in my own way, I had thought out the problem of the growth of the varying forms of animal life, exactly to the Darwinian conclusion.
Whitman's Leaves of Grass became my Bible.
It was at this time that I made the harrowing discovery that I had been working evil on myself ... through an advertisement of a quack in a daily paper.
And now I became an anchorite battling to save myself from the newly discovered monstrosity of the flesh.... For several days I would be the victor, but the thing I hugged to my bosom would finally win. Then would follow a terror beyond comprehension, a horror of remorse and degradation that human nature seemed too frail to bear. I grew thinner still. I fell into a hacking cough.