; there's something sort of haunted
about it. The boy is not strong, for one thing. I happen to know that he
was born in Colorado, only a few months before his mother died out there
of a long illness. There is something wrong about the fellow."

The drawing master had come to realize that, in looking at Paul, one
saw only his white teeth and the forced animation of his eyes. One warm
afternoon the boy had gone to sleep at his drawing board, and his master
had noted with amazement what a white, blue-veined face it was; drawn
and wrinkled like an old man's about the eyes, the lips twitching even
in his sleep, and stiff with a nervous tension that drew them back from
his teeth.

His teachers left the building dissatisfied and unhappy; humiliated to
have felt so vindictive toward a mere boy, to have uttered this feeling
in cutting terms, and to have set each other on, as it were, in the
gruesome game of intemperate reproach. Some of them remembered having
seen a miserable street cat set at bay by a ring of tormentors.

As for Paul, he ran down the hill whistling the "Soldiers' Chorus" from
_Faust_, looking wildly behind him now and then to see whether some of
his teachers were not there to writhe under his lightheartedness. As it
was now late in the afternoon and Paul was on duty that evening as usher
at Carnegie Hall, he decided that he would not go home to supper. When
he reached the concert hall the doors were not yet open and, as it was
chilly outside, he decided to go up into the picture gallery--always
deserted at this hour--where there were some of Raffelli's gay studies
of Paris streets and an airy blue Venetian scene or two that always
exhilarated him. He was delighted to find no one in the gallery but the
old guard, who sat in one corner, a newspaper on his knee, a black patch
over one eye and the other closed. Paul possessed himself of the peace
and walked confidently up and down, whistling under his breath. After a
while he sat down before a blue Rico and lost himself. When he bethought
him to look at his watch, it was after seven o'clock, and he rose with
a start and ran downstairs, making a face at Augustus, peering out from
the cast room, and an evil gesture at the Venus de Milo as he passed her
on the stairway.

When Paul reached the ushers' dressing room half a dozen boys were there
already, and he began excitedly to tumble into his uniform. It was one
of the few that at all approached fitting, and Paul