Martian who might have been bundled down to earth. He had wavy black
hair, of raven black, a dark olive complexion, flushed, in spite of
haphazard nourishment and nights spent on the stone floor of the
reeking scullery, with the warm blood of health, great liquid black
eyes, and the exquisitely delicate features of a young Praxitelean
god. It was this preposterous perfection which, while redeeming him
from ridiculous beauty by giving his childish face a certain
rigidity, differentiated him outwardly from his fellows. Mr. Button,
to whom the unusual was anathema, declared that the sight of the
monstrosity made him sick, and rarely suffered him in his presence;
and one day Mrs. Button, discovering him in front of the cracked
mirror in which Mr. Button shaved, when his hand was steady enough,
on Sunday afternoons, smote him over the face with a pound of rump
steak which she happened to be carrying, instinctively desirous not
only to correct her son for vanity, but also to spoil the comeliness
of which he might be vain.

Until a wonderful and illuminating happening in his eleventh year,
little Paul Kegworthy had taken existence with the fatalism of a
child. Of his stepfather, who smelt lustily of sour beer, bad
tobacco and incidentally of other things undetected by Paul's
nostrils, and whom he saw rarely, he dwelt in mortal terror. When he
heard of the Devil, at Sunday school, which he attended, to his
stepfather's disgust, he pictured the Prince of Darkness not as a
gentleman, not even as a picturesque personage with horns and tail,
but as Mr. Button. As regards his mother, he had a confused idea
that he was a living blight on her existence. He was not sorry,
because it was not his fault, but in his childish way he coldly
excused her, and, more from a queer consciousness of blighterdom
than from dread of her hand and tongue, he avoided her as much as