strawberry, mixed, before approaching the fountain. Once there,
however, and a large glass of these flavors and diluted ice-cream
proving merely provocative, he said, languidly--an affectation, for he
could have disposed of half a dozen with gusto: "Well, now I'm here, I
might as well go one more. Fill 'er up again. Same."

Emerging to the street, penniless, he bent a fascinated and dramatic
gaze upon his reflection in the drug-store window, and then, as he
turned his back upon the alluring image, his expression altered to
one of lofty and uncondescending amusement. That was his glance at the
passing public. From the heights, he seemed to bestow upon the world
a mysterious derision--for William Sylvanus Baxter was seventeen long
years of age, and had learned to present the appearance of one who
possesses inside information about life and knows all strangers and most
acquaintances to be of inferior caste, costume, and intelligence.

He lingered upon the corner awhile, not pressed for time. Indeed, he
found many hours of these summer months heavy upon his hands, for he had
no important occupation, unless some intermittent dalliance with a
work on geometry (anticipatory of the distant autumn) might be thought
important, which is doubtful, since he usually went to sleep on the
shady side porch at his home, with the book in his hand. So, having
nothing to call him elsewhere, he lounged before the drug-store in the
early afternoon sunshine, watching the passing to and fro of the lower
orders and bourgeoisie of the middle-sized midland city which claimed
him (so to speak) for a native son.

Apparently quite unembarrassed by his presence, they went about their
business, and the only people who looked at him with any attention were
pedestrians of color. It is true that when the gaze of these fell upon
him it was instantly arrested, for no colored person could have passed
him without a little pang of pleasure and of longing. Indeed, the
tropical violence of William Sylvanus Baxter's tie and the strange
brilliancy of his hat might have made it positively unsafe for him to
walk at night through the negro quarter of the town. And though no man
could have sworn to the color of that hat, whether it was blue or green,
yet its color was a saner thing than its shape, which was blurred,
tortured, and raffish; it might have been the miniature model of a
volcano that had blown off its cone and misbehaved disastrously on its
lower slopes a