pleasure from the performance—as if it gratified him to be sure that effect was following on cause inevitably.

[25]

I have never, I believe, been cruel to an animal in my life. I hated cruelty then as I hate it now. I have always shirked the sight of anything in pain from my childhood onwards. Yet the fact is that not only did I nothing to interfere in what I saw[26] going on, but that I was deeply interested and absorbed in it. I can only explain that to myself now, by supposing that I knew then, that the creature in front of me was not of my own kind, and was not, in fact, outraging any law of its own being. Is not that possible? May I not have collected unawares so much out of created nature? I am unable to say: all I am clear about is that here was a thing in the semblance of a boy doing what I had never observed a boy do, and what if I ever had observed a boy do, would have flung me into a transport of rage and grief. Here, therefore, was a thing in the semblance of a boy who was no boy at all. So much must have been as certain to me then as it is indisputable now.

[26]

One doesn't, at that age, reason things out; one knows them, and is dumb, though unconvinced, before powerful syllogisms to the contrary. All children are so, confronted by strange phenomena. And yet I had facts to go upon if, child as I was, I had been capable of inference. I need only mention one. If this creature had been human, upon seeing that I was conscious of its behaviour to the rabbit, it would either have stopped the moment it perceived that I did not approve or was not amused, or it would have continued deliberately out of bravado. But it neither stopped nor hardily continued. It watched its experiment with interest for a little,[27] then, finding me more interesting, did not discontinue it, but ceased to watch it. He went on with it mechanically, dreamingly, as if to the excitation of some other sense than sight, that of feeling, for instance. He went on lasciviously, for the sake of the pleasure so to be had. In other words, being without self-consciousness and ignorant of shame, he must have been non-human.

[27]

After all, too, it must be owned that I cannot have been confronted by the appearance for more than a few minutes. Allow me three to have been spent before I was aware of him, three more will be the outside I can have passed gazing at him. But I speak of "minutes," of course, referring to my ostensible self, that inert, apathetic child who followed its mother, that 

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