Page "belles_lettres" Paragraph 549

However, it was not of innocence in general that I was speaking, but of perhaps the frailest and surely the least important side of it which is innocence in romantic love.

Here, if anywhere, it is not wholly incontrovertible.

To you, for instance, the word innocence, in this connotation, probably retained its Biblical, or should I say technical sense, and therefore I suppose I must make myself quite clear by saying that I lost -- or rather handed over -- what you would have considered to be my innocence two weeks before I was legally entitled, and in fact by oath required, to hand it over along with what other goods and bads I had.

But to me innocence is far less tangible.

I had long since begun to lose my general innocence when I lost my trust in you, but this special innocence I lost before ever I loved, through my discovery that one could tremble with desire and even experience a flaming delight that had nothing, nothing whatever to do with friendship or liking, let alone with love.

I knew this knowledge to be corrupting at the time I acquired it ; ;

today, these many years later, after all the temptations resisted or yielded to, the weasel satisfactions and the engulfing dissatisfactions since endured, I call it corrupting still.