r, with snub noses, coarse mouths, and eyes of an
indeterminate blue. Of that type, once blowsily good-looking, was Mrs.
Button herself. But Paul wandered a changeling about the Bludston
streets. In the rows of urchins in the crowded Board School classroom
he sat as conspicuous as any little Martian who might have been bundled
down to earth. He had wavy black hair, of raven black, a dark olive
complexion, flushed, in spite of haphazard nourishment and nights spent
on the stone floor of the reeking scullery, with the warm blood of
health, great liquid black eyes, and the exquisitely delicate features
of a young Praxitelean god. It was this preposterous perfection which,
while redeeming him from ridiculous beauty by giving his childish face
a certain rigidity, differentiated him outwardly from his fellows. Mr.
Button, to whom the unusual was anathema, declared that the sight of
the monstrosity made him sick, and rarely suffered him in his presence;
and one day Mrs. Button, discovering him in front of the cracked mirror
in which Mr. Button shaved, when his hand was steady enough, on Sunday
afternoons, smote him over the face with a pound of rump steak which
she happened to be carrying, instinctively desirous not only to correct
her son for vanity, but also to spoil the comeliness of which he might
be vain.

Until a wonderful and illuminating happening in his eleventh year,
little Paul Kegworthy had taken existence with the fatalism of a child.
Of his stepfather, who smelt lustily of sour beer, bad tobacco and
incidentally of other things undetected by Paul's nostrils, and whom he
saw rarely, he dwelt in mortal terror. When he heard of the Devil, at
Sunday school, which he attended, to his stepfather's disgust, he
pictured the Prince of Darkness not as a gentleman, not even as a
picturesque personage with horns and tail, but as Mr. Button. As
regards his mother, he had a confused idea that he was a living blight
on her existence. He was not sorry, because it was not his fault, but
in his childish way he coldly excused her, and, more from a queer
consciousness of blighterdom than from dread of her hand and tongue, he
avoided her as much as possible. In the little Buttons his experience
as scapegoat taught him to take but little interest. From his earliest
memories they were the first to be fed, clothed and bedded; to his own
share fell the exiguous scraps. As they were much younger than himself,
he found no pleasure in their