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 bears was responsible for a slight stiffening of spine at this friendly demonstration. His pendantism was revolted by the fault in spelling. Nevertheless he skipped off to school with more kindliness in his heart than ever before.

His alternative chum of this period was a boy of a conventionalized stamp. Walter Dreer's easy assurance reflected a definite social status which was substantiated by his father's victories at the local polls, and by the frosted walnut cakes that topped off his mother's Sunday-evening suppers. Everything about Walter was comfortably and infallibly bourgeois but his private thoughts, and these, as Paul later came to realize, verged on the lurid. Walter's prurience was an undercurrent against which Paul instinctively swam, cultivating Walter for his amiable laughter at one's whims and fancies, for his resourcefulness, his flexibility, his boundless information, and (since Paul was so generally isolated) for his popularity, which was in Paul's eyes a supreme distinction. Walter, mirabile dictu, approved of him, or seemed to, whereas he had always expected conventional people to disapprove or at the most approve with definite reservations. Above all, Walter constituted him the privileged audience for his best capers cut, as it were, for Paul's private amusement and in confident anticipation of Paul's rapturous applause—Walter, who had the whole village to choose from! Paul worshipped him.

Walter's cardinal deficiency was that he snubbed Mark Laval. Though Paul felt this to be unjust, he couldn't help being influenced by Walter's contemptuous opinion, and was guilty of treating Mark with less generosity than his instinct prompted. Moreover, in order to win Walter's fuller approval, he was at some pains to conceal his own