" And he wondered what he should
have thought had he bought the book to feed the imagination the
bookseller's comment was intended to arouse.
In the small towns through which Sam walked and in the small town in which
he grew to manhood vice was openly crude and masculine. It went to sleep
sprawling across a dirty beer-soaked table in Art Sherman's saloon in
Piety Hollow, and the newsboy passed it without comment, regretting that
it slept and that it had no money with which to buy papers.
"Dissipation and vice get into the life of youth," he thought, coming to a
street corner where young men played pool and smoked cigarettes in a dingy
poolroom, and turned back toward the heart of the city. "It gets into all
modern life. The farmer boy coming up to the city to work hears lewd
stories in the smoking car of the train, and the travelling men from the
cities tell tales of the city streets to the group about the stove in
village stores."
Sam did not quarrel with the fact that youth touched vice. Such things
were a part of the world that men and women had made for their sons and
daughters to live in, and that night as he wandered in the streets of
Rochester he thought that he would like all youth to know, if they could
but know, truth.
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