understood. For her, just outside the door of the concert hall, lay
the black pond with the cattle-tracked bluffs; the tall, unpainted
house, with weather-curled boards; naked as a tower, the crook-backed
ash seedlings where the dishcloths hung to dry; the gaunt, molting
turkeys picking up refuse about the kitchen door.
Paul's Case
_A Study in Temperament_
It was Paul's afternoon to appear before the faculty of the Pittsburgh
High School to account for his various misdemeanors. He had been
suspended a week ago, and his father had called at the Principal's
office and confessed his perplexity about his son. Paul entered the
faculty room suave and smiling. His clothes were a trifle outgrown, and
the tan velvet on the collar of his open overcoat was frayed and worn;
but for all that there was something of the dandy about him, and he
wore an opal pin in his neatly knotted black four-in-hand, and a red
carnation in his buttonhole. This latter adornment the faculty somehow
felt was not properly significant of the contrite spirit befitting a boy
under the ban of suspension.
Paul was tall for his age and very thin, with high, cramped shoulders
and a narrow chest. His eyes were remarkable for a certain hysterical
brilliancy, and he continually used them in a conscious, theatrical sort
of way, peculiarly offensive in a boy. The pupils were abnormally large,
as though he were addicted to belladonna, but there was a glassy glitter
about them which that drug does not produce.
When questioned by the Principal as to why he was there Paul stated,
politely enough, that he wanted to come back to school. This was a lie,
but Paul was quite accustomed to lying; found it, indeed, indispensable
for overcoming friction. His teachers were asked to state their
respective charges against him, which they did with such a rancor and
aggrievedness as evinced that this was not a usual case, Disorder and
impertinence were among the offenses named, yet each of his instructors
felt that it was scarcely possible to put into words the real cause of
the trouble, which lay in a sort of hysterically defiant manner of the
boy's; in the contempt which they all knew he felt for them, and which
he seemingly made not the least effort to conceal. Once, when he had
been making a synopsis of a paragraph at the blackboard, his English
teacher had stepped to his side and attempted to guide his hand. Paul
had started back with a shudder and thrust his han
|