He was rather small for his age and was almost absurdly beautiful, with his curly hair, round Austrian head, and amusing pricked ears. His eyes were set very wide apart. They were blue. His nose was straight, and very slightly tip-tilted, and his lips were as delicately modelled as the petals of a rose. They were always tremulous as he shrank under the vivid impressions that poured in on him in bewildering profusion. He began to grow physically and spiritually, though not at all mentally, and he lived in a state of bewilderment, retaining shrewdness enough to cling to the necessary plain fact that he was at the school to be a success, for if he failed he would sink back into the already detestable world inhabited by Issy and Harry. He created quite a stir at the school. Mr. Sivwright, a Lancashire Scotsman, whose youthful revolt against commerce and grime had carried him in the direction of art only so far as the municipal school, said he was an infant prodigy and made a show of him. To Mendel's disgust Mr. Sivwright assured the other pupils that he was a Pole. This was his first intimation that there was, in the splendid free Christian world, a prejudice against Jews. He was rather shocked and disgusted, for never in his life had he found occasion to call anything by other than its right name. It took him weeks to conquer his shyness sufficiently to protest. "I am a Jew," he said to Mr. Sivwright. "Why do you call me a Pole?" "Well," said Mr. Sivwright, "there's Chopin, you know, and Paderewski, don't you know, and Kosciusko, and the Jews don't stand for anything but money. And, after all, you do come from Poland." "But I am a Jew." "You don't look it, and there's some swing about being a Pole. There's no swing about being a Jew. It stops dead, you know. I don't know why it is, but it stops dead." The words frightened Mendel. How awful it would be if he were to stop dead, to reach the Polytechnic and to go no further!