children played only in the town.

There, on the outskirts, was a shallow, stony river, but deep enough at
one point for gingerly swimming. Stefan seemed never to have been cool
through the summer except when he was squatting or paddling in this hole.
He remembered only indistinctly the boys with whom he bathed; he had no
friends among them. But there had been a little girl with starched white
skirts, huge blue bows over blue eyes, and yellow hair, whom he had
admired to adoration. She wanted desperately to bathe in the hole, and he
demanded of her mother that this be permitted. Stefan smiled grimly as he
recalled the horror of that lady, who had boxed his ears for trying to
lead her girl into ungodliness, and to scandalize the neighbors. The
friendship had been kept up surreptitiously after this, with interchange
of pencils and candy, until the little girl--he had forgotten her name
--put her tongue out at him over a matter of chewing-gum which he had
insisted she should not use. Revolted, he played alone again.

The Presbyterian Church Stefan remembered as a whitewashed praying box,
resounding to his father's high-pitched voice. It was filled with heat
and flies from without in summer, and heat and steam from within in
winter. The school, whitewashed again, he recalled as a succession of
banging desks, flying paper pellets, and the drone of undigested lessons.
Here the water bucket loomed as the alleviation in summer, or the red hot
oblong of the open stove in winter time. Through all these scenes, by an
egotistical trick of the brain, he saw himself moving, a small brown-
haired boy, with olive skin and queer, greenish eyes, entirely alien,
absolutely lonely, completely critical. He saw himself in too large,
ill-chosen clothes, the butt of his playfellows. He saw the sidelong,
interested glances of little girls change to curled lips and tossed heads
at the grinning nudge of their boy companions. He saw the harassed eyes