Little did he notice of the people or of the things he passed, as he walked away from the bookshop! Once out of Evershot Road, however, his feet dragged slowly. What he had read in Slate ⁠—those short, compact sentences⁠—passed through his mind like depraved choirboys in white surplices. “Have I done what she hinted?” he said to himself. “Have I troubled her senses by my advances and retreats, until she’s lost something that it’s essential for a girl to have?”

He groaned aloud as he walked, and trailed his stick along the ground. “What will the upshot be if that old man has begun persecuting her like that ?”