but because he
recognized in Paul something akin to what churchmen term "vocation."

It was at the theater and at Carnegie Hall that Paul really lived; the
rest was but a sleep and a forgetting. This was Paul's fairy tale,
and it had for him all the allurement of a secret love. The moment he
inhaled the gassy, painty, dusty odor behind the scenes, he breathed
like a prisoner set free, and felt within him the possibility of doing
or saying splendid, brilliant, poetic things. The moment the cracked
orchestra beat out the overture from _Martha_, or jerked at the serenade
from _Rigoletto_, all stupid and ugly things slid from him, and his
senses were deliciously, yet delicately fired.

Perhaps it was because, in Paul's world, the natural nearly always wore
the guise of ugliness, that a certain element of artificiality seemed to
him necessary in beauty. Perhaps it was because his experience of
life elsewhere was so full of Sabbath-school picnics, petty economies,
wholesome advice as to how to succeed in life, and the inescapable odors
of cooking, that he found this existence so alluring, these smartly clad
men and women so attractive, that he was so moved by these starry apple
orchards that bloomed perennially under the limelight.

It would be difficult to put it strongly enough how convincingly
the stage entrance of that theater was for Paul the actual portal of
Romance. Certainly none of the company ever suspected it, least of all
Charley Edwards. It was very like the old stories that used to float
about London of fabulously rich Jews, who had subterranean halls there,
with palms, and fountains, and soft lamps and richly appareled women
who never saw the disenchanting light of London day. So, in the midst of
that smoke-palled city, enamored of figures and grimy toil, Paul had
his secret temple, his wishing carpet, his bit of blue-and-white
Mediterranean shore bathed in perpetual sunshine.

Several of Paul's teachers had a theory that his imagination had been
perverted by garish fiction, but the truth was that he scarcely ever
read at all. The books at home were not such as would either tempt or
corrupt a youthful mind, and as for reading the novels that some of his
friends urged upon him--well, he got what he wanted much more quickly
from music; any sort of music, from an orchestra to a barrel organ.
He needed only the spark, the indescribable thrill that made his
imagination master of his senses, and he could make plot