In regard to the perversity of Mr. Urquhart, he had taken for granted that the man’s sex-aberration was merely the medium through which unspeakable emanations of evil⁠—beyond sex altogether!⁠—flowed up into the world.

“But what is this evil?” he asked himself now letting his mind hover like a hungry cormorant over the heaving waters of his troubled senses. Vague intimations concerning some sort of inert malice , that was beyond all viciousness, rose up within him as his mind’s deepest response. Hunting irritably for some gap in the hedge by which to escape, he tried to define this inert malice. Was it an atavistic reversion to the primordial “matter,” or “world-stuff”⁠—sluggish, reluctant, opaque⁠—out of which, at the beginning of things, life had had to force its way? Was this, and not his attitude to any youthful Redfern, the real secret of Urquhart’s harmfulness?