er
he could. For more than a year Paul had spent every available moment
loitering about Charley Edwards's dressing-room. He had won a place among
Edwards's following not only because the young actor, who could not
afford to employ a dresser, often found him useful, but because he
recognized in Paul something akin to what churchmen term "vocation."

It was at the theatre and at Carnegie Hall that Paul really lived; the
rest was but a sleep and a forgetting. This was Paul's fairy tale, and
it had for him all the allurement of a secret love. The moment he inhaled
the gassy, painty, dusty odour behind the scenes, he breathed like a
prisoner set free, and felt within him the possibility of doing or saying
splendid, brilliant things. The moment the cracked orchestra beat out the
overture from _Martha_, or jerked at the serenade from _Rigoletto_, all
stupid and ugly things slid from him, and his senses were deliciously,
yet delicately fired.

Perhaps it was because, in Paul's world, the natural nearly always wore
the guise of ugliness, that a certain element of artificiality seemed to
him necessary in beauty. Perhaps it was because his experience of life
elsewhere was so full of Sabbath-school picnics, petty economies,
wholesome advice as to how to succeed in life, and the unescapable odours
of cooking, that he found this existence so alluring, these smartly-clad
men and women so attractive, that he was so moved by these starry apple
orchards that bloomed perennially under the lime-light.

It would be difficult to put it strongly enough how convincingly the
stage entrance of that theatre was for Paul the actual portal of Romance.
Certainly none of the company ever suspected it, least of all Charley
Edwards. It was very like the old stories that used to float about London
of fabulously rich Jews, who had subterranean halls, with palms, and
fountains, and soft lamps and richly apparelled women who never saw the
disenchanting light of London day. So, in the midst of that smoke-palled
city, enamoured of figures and grimy toil, Paul had his secret temple,
his wishing-carpet, his bit of blue-and-white Mediterranean shore bathed
in perpetual sunshine.

Several of Paul's teachers had a theory that his imagination had been
perverted by garish fiction; but the truth was, he scarcely ever read at
all. The books at home were not such as would either tempt or corrupt a
youthful mind, and as for reading the novels that some of his friend