May was gazing up solemnly with tear smudges on her face. Aunt Julia's beautiful long hand pushed the damp locks away from the girl's high pearl-smooth forehead. "Oh, Aunt Julia, I love you! I love you! I love you!" "I'm glad, dear." Aunt Julia looked consciously sad and stared at the carpet. Her fingers continued their half-mechanical caress. Suddenly May sprang to her feet, clapped her palms together, and began to pirouette. Then she ran to Aunt Julia and kissed her again. "I'm so happy!" In herself she was still recalling Paul's kisses, and in them escaping the old terror that had possessed her again in her grandmother's house. Julia, convicted of her own brutality, regarded May pityingly. * * * * * The last semester was over. Paul, carrying his books under his arm, slouched out of the High School yard, his cap pulled over his face. Hell! Those kids! What if he had flunked in several things! He had just left a group who were betting on next year's football eleven. Next year by mid-season it would be a college or a business school for him. When he talked to those boys he tried to joke as they did about life and "smut". He was only really interested in what they said when they talked "smut". Then he looked at them curiously and wanted to be like them. Like them! Good Lord! They were donkeys. Even the ones who sailed beyond him in their classes. He wanted them to know what he was--that his views were outrageous. But there was Felix, a short brown little monkey, a Russian Jew with excited far-seeing eyes, who enjoyed debating. He said Paul's vision was warped by his personal problem. Paul tried to make Felix talk about women. Felix blushed slightly, while his eyes, bright and remote, remained fixed unwaveringly on Paul's face. Felix said he respected women as the mothers of the race. He thought the boys at school had cheap ideas about sexual laxity. That he never was so utterly strong and possessed of himself as when he put women out of his mind. Then he could give his whole soul to humanity. Paul blushed, yet sneered. Felix! Women! That brat! "Is your father a tailor or an undertaker, Felix?" Afterward it hurt Paul to remember the wrong idea of himself which he had been at such pains to impart. It would be nice to belong somewhere! Away from the deserted schoolhouse, Paul strolled into the park. Against the gleaming afternoon sky that was a dim milky blue, the trees were shivering. He watched whirling oak leaves that looked black on the high branches. Stretched on the grass tops, silver spider threads twitched with reflections. The bright grass, bending, seemed to rush before him like a blown cloud. Deep blots of shadow were on the lake, where, here and there, taut strands of light sparkled and broke through the shaken surface. May's step-mother. He kept trying to push that woman away, crowding up to him with her sanctimonious face. He wanted to do violence to something. He hated himself.