from
under him, and he saved himself from falling only by wildly clutching
the desk before him. As it was, he fell almost into her lap and
everybody shrieked with uncontrollable laughter. In the midst of it,
Miss Clayson, the teacher, came hurrying in to silence the tumult, and
Bradley rushed from the room like a bull from the arena, maddened with
the spears of the toreador. He snatched his hat and coat from the rack
and hardly looked up till he reached the haven of his little cellar.

He threw his cap on the floor and for a half hour raged up and down the
floor, his mortification and shame and rage finding vent in a fit of
cursing such as he had never had in his life before. All awkwardness
was gone now. His great limbs, supple and swift, clenched, doubled, and
thrust out against the air in unconscious lightning-swift gestures that
showed how terrible he could be when roused.

At last he grew calm enough to sit down, and then his mood changed to
the deepest dejection. He sank into a measureless despair. A terrible
ache came into his throat.

They were right, he was a great hulking fool. He never could be
anything but a clod-hopper, anyway. He looked down at his great hand,
at his short trousers, and the indecent ugliness of his horrible boots,
and studied himself without mercy to himself. He acknowledged that they
were hideous, but he couldn't help it.

Then his mind took another turn and he went over the history of that
suit. He didn't want it when he bought it, but he found himself like
wax, moulded by the soft, white, confidential hands of the Jew
salesman, who offered it to him as a special favor below cost. In
common with other young men of his sort he always felt under obligation
to buy if he went into a store, even if there were nothing there that
suited him. He knew when he bought the suit and paid eleven dollars for
it that he would always be sorry, and its cheapness now appalled him.

He always swore at himself for this weakness before the salesman, and
yet, year by year he had been cheated in the same way. For the first
time, however, he saw his clothing in all its hideousness. Those cruel
girls and grinning boys had shown him that clothes made the man, even
in a western school. The worst part of it was that he had been
humiliated by a girl and there was no redress. His strength of limb was
useless here.

He sat there till darkness came into his room. He did not replenish the
coal in the stove that l