companionship. For society he sought such
of the youth of Budge Street as would admit him into their raucous
fellowship. But, for some reason which his immature mind could not
fathom, he felt a pariah even among his coevals. He could run as fast
as Billy Goodge, the undisputed leader of the gang; he could dribble
the rag football past him any time he desired; once he had sent him
home to his mother with a bleeding nose, and, even in that hour of
triumph, popular sympathy had been with Billy, not with him. It was the
only problem in existence to which his fatalism did not supply the key.
He knew himself to be a better man than Billy Goodge. There was no
doubt about it. At school, where Billy was the woodenest blockhead, he
was top of his class. He knew things about troy weight and geography
and Isaac and the Mariners of England of which Billy did not dream. To
Billy the football news in the Saturday afternoon edition of The
Bludston Herald was a cryptogram; to him it was an open book. He would
stand, acknowledged scholar, at the street corner and read out from the
soiled copy retrieved by Chunky, the newsboy, the enthralling story of
the football day, never stumbling over a syllable, athrill with the joy
of being the umbilicus of a tense world, and, when the recital was
over, he would have the mortification of seeing the throng pass away
from him with the remorselessness of a cloud scudding from the moon.
And he would hear Billy Goodge say exultantly:

"Didn't Aw tell yo' the Wolves hadn't a dog's chance?"

And he would see the admiring gang slap Billy on the back, and hear
"Good owd Billy!" and never a word of thanks to him. Then, knowing
Billy to be a liar, he would tell him so, yelping shrilly, in
Buttonesque vernacular (North and South):

"This morning tha said it was five to one on Sheffield United."

"Listen to Susie!"

The parasitic urchins would yell at the witticism--the eternal petitio
principii of childhood, which Billy, secure in his cohort from bloody
nose, felt justified in making. And Paul Kegworthy, the rag of a
newspaper crumpled tight in his little hand, would watch them disappear
and wonder at the paradox of life. In any sphere of human effort, so he
dimly and childishly realized, he could wipe out Billy Goodge. He had a
soul-reaching contempt for Billy Goodge, a passionate envy of him. Why
did Billy hold his position instead of crumbling into dust before him?
Assuredly he was a better man than B