but her face also had the false, hostile and conspiratorial secrecy of the others.
Eddy Murphy, the youngest boy, was also the best of the crowd. All decent and generous impulse had not yet been killed or deadened in him; he still possessed a warped and blunted friendliness, the rudiments of some youthful feeling for a better, warmer, bolder, and more liberal kind of life. As time went on, he made a few awkward, shamed, and inarticulate advances toward friendship; he began to come into the young man’s room from time to time, and presently to tell him a little of his life at college and his hopes for the future. He was a little fellow, with the same dry, febrile, alert, and corky figure that his father had: he was one of the dark Irish; he had black hair and black eyes, and one of his legs was badly bowed and bent outward, the result, he said, of having broken it in a high-school football game. The first time he came into the room he stood around shyly, awkwardly, and mistrustfully for a spell, blurting out a few words from time to time, and looking at the books and papers with a kind of dazed and stricken stupefaction.
“Watcha do wit all dese books? Huh?”
“I read them.”
“Guh-wan! Watcha tryin’t’hand me? Y’ain’t read all dem books! Dey ain’t no guy dat’s read dat much.”
As a matter of fact, there were only two or three hundred books in the place, but he could not have been more impressed if the entire contents of the Widener Library had been stored there.
“Well, I have read them all,” the other said. “Most of them, anyway, and a lot more besides.”
“Guh-wan! No kiddin’!” he said, in a dazed tone and with an air of astounded disbelief. “Watcha want to read so much for?”
“I like to read. Don’t you?”
“Oh, I don’t know. You know,” he said painfully, with the slightest convulsive movement of his hands and shoulders. “…’S'all right.”
“You have to read for your classes at Boston College, don’t you?”
“DO I?” he cried, with a sudden waking to life. “I’ll say I do!… Ho-ly Chee! Duh way dose guys pile it on to you is a crime!”
There was another awkward silence; he continued to stare at the books and to fumble about in an embarrassed and tongue-tied manner, and suddenly he burst out explosively and triumphantly: “Shakespeare was de greatest poet dat evah lived. He wrote plays an’sonnets. A sonnet is a pome of foihteen lines: it is
