This chapter opens with a flashback to the previous chapter, in which we learn that lunaison had tried to kill the young man, but that he had saved him from the attack. The young man is now in the care of Proteus, and he tells the narrator that he has learned a valuable lesson: "people just turn into adults" . The narrator wonders what would happen if a young man were to take advantage of his body for his own pleasure and then ditch it. He then goes on to say that the words "seducer naive young people" and "take advantage of bodies for their own pleasure" keep weighing on him, and that at the age of 21, people "just turn into adult"