His teachers were in despair, and his drawing master voiced the feeling of them all when he declared there was something about the boy which none of them understood.  He added:  “I don’t really believe that smile of his comes altogether from insolence; there’s something sort of haunted about it.  The boy is not strong, for one thing.  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.

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 grewsome game of intemperate reproach.  One 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 witness 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.  It was chilly outside, and 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 the corner, a newspaper on his knee, a black patch over one eye and the other closed.  Paul possessed himself of the place 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 Caesar, peering out from the cast-room, and an evil gesture at the Venus of 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 thought it very becoming—­though he knew the tight, straight coat accentuated his narrow chest, about which he was exceedingly sensitive.  He was always excited while he dressed, twanging all over to the tuning of the strings and the preliminary flourishes of the horns in the music-room; but tonight he seemed quite beside himself, and he teased and plagued the boys until, telling him that he was crazy, they put him down on the floor and sat on him.