It was all a matter of degree. Bill Howard was the fortunate man, the untroubled, the world’s favored. It was only a question of degree, upward from the professor who screwed the pig (ludicrous though it still sounded), to the teacher or philanthropist or minister or banker beaten up by a sailor in a water-­front dive or cheap West Side hotel, to the bedizened pansy who cruised Riverside Drive looking for roughnecks or servicemen, to the brilliant dancer or artist whose neurosis was the very foundation of his art, to the scoutmaster or headmaster in a boys’ school whose sublimated passion for boys in knee pants fitted him so completely for his tasks, to John Grandin himself, and to the well-­adjusted happy Bill Howard; and from there, downward, it was only a matter of degree again—from Bill Howard, to the husband who must be at his wife day and night, to the sex-­obsessed traveling salesman, to the married man who boasted of extramarital conquests amounting to satyriasis, to the seducer of girls barely this side of puberty, to the vicious rapist, and to the so-­called sex maniac whose lust for girl children culminated in murder and mutilation. All were pitiable, helpless, or tragic—except Bill Howard, who was just lucky.

Bitterly John Grandin had discovered himself to be the kind of man he refused to become. He wished with all his heart that he could find in himself a bold affirmation which said that his fondness for Cliff Hauman—his infatuation, if it came to that—needed no justification whatever; the fact was enough. But the fact was what he could not accept.