A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - The Original Classic Edition. Joyce James

--In a pantomime, love.

       The child leaned her ringletted head against her mother's sleeve, gazing on the picture, and murmured as if fascinated:

       --The beautiful Mabel Hunter!

       As if fascinated, her eyes rested long upon those demurely taunting eyes and she murmured devotedly:

       --Isn't she an exquisite creature?

       And the boy who came in from the street, stamping crookedly under his stone of coal, heard her words. He dropped his load promptly on the floor and hurried to her side to see. He mauled the edges of the paper with his reddened and blackened hands, shouldering her aside and complaining that he could not see.

       He was sitting in the narrow breakfast room high up in the old dark-windowed house. The firelight flickered on the wall and beyond the window a spectral dusk was gathering upon the river. Before the fire an old woman was busy making tea and, as she bustled at the task, she told in a low voice of what the priest and the doctor had said. She told too of certain changes they had seen in her of late and of her odd ways and sayings. He sat listening to the words and following the ways of adventure that lay open in the coals, arches and vaults and winding galleries and jagged caverns.

       Suddenly he became aware of something in the doorway. A skull appeared suspended in the gloom of the doorway. A feeble creature

       like a monkey was there, drawn thither by the sound of voices at the fire. A whining voice came from the door asking:

       --Is that Josephine?

       The old bustling woman answered cheerily from the fireplace:

       --No, Ellen, it's Stephen.

       --O... O, good evening, Stephen.

       He answered the greeting and saw a silly smile break over the face in the doorway.

       --Do you want anything, Ellen? asked the old woman at the fire. But she did not answer the question and said:

       --I thought it was Josephine. I thought you were Josephine, Stephen. And, repeating this several times, she fell to laughing feebly.

       He was sitting in the midst of a children's party at Harold's Cross. His silent watchful manner had grown upon him and he took little part in the games. The children, wearing the spoils of their crackers, danced and romped noisily and, though he tried to share their merriment, he felt himself a gloomy figure amid the gay cocked hats and sunbonnets.

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