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hatred and tears up to his eyes, as if a volcano were churning in him. He had hoped his mother might take a hint from his saying that he was cold in his silly short shorts. He had hoped his mother might remember what he had told her, that the fellow he had wanted to get acquainted with downstairs, a fellow who looked about his own age, eleven, had laughed at his short pants on Monday afternoon. They make you wear your kid brother’s pants or something? Victor had drifted away, mortified. What if the fellow knew he didn’t even own any longer pants, not even a pair of knickers, much less long pants, even blue jeans! His mother, for some cock-eyed reason, wanted him to look “French,” and made him wear short shorts and stockings that came to just below his knees, and dopey shirts with round collars. His mother wanted him to stay about six years old, for ever, all his life. She liked to test out her drawings on him. Veector is my sounding board , she sometimessaid to her friends. I show my drawings to Veector and I know if children will like them . Often Victor said he liked stories that he did not like, or drawings that he was indifferent to, because he felt sorry for his mother and because it put her in a better mood if he said he liked them. He was quite tired now of children’s book illustrations, if he had ever in his life liked them—he really couldn’t remember—and now he had two favorites: Howard Pyle’s illustrations in some of Robert Louis Stevenson’s books and Cruikshank’s in Dickens. It was too bad, Victor thought, that he was absolutely the last person of whom his mother should have asked an opinion, because he simply hated children’s illustrations. And it was a wonder his mother didn’t see this, because she hadn’t sold any illustrations for books for years and years, not since Wimple-Dimple , a book whose jacket was all torn and turning yellow now from age, which sat in the center of the bookshelf in a little cleared spot, propped up against the back of the bookcase so everyone could see it. Victor had been seven years old when that book was printed. His mother liked to tell people and remind him, too, that he had told her what he wanted to see her draw, had watched her make every drawing, had shown his opinion by laughing or not, and that she had been absolutely guided by him. Victor doubted this very much, because first of all the story was somebody else’s and had been written before his mother did the drawings, and her drawings had had to follow the story, naturally. Since then, his mother had done only a few illustrations now and then for magazines for children, how to make paper pumpkins and black paper cats for Hallowe’en and things like that, though she took her portfolio around to publishers all the time. Their income came from his father, who was a wealthy businessman in France, anexporter of perfumes. His mother said he was very wealthy and very handsome. But he had married again, he never wrote, and Victor had no interest in him, didn’t even care if he never saw a picture of him, and he never had. His father was French with some Polish, and his mother was Hungarian with some French. The word Hungarian made Victor think of gypsies, but when he had asked his mother once, she had said emphatically that she hadn’t any gypsy blood, and she had been annoyed that Victor brought the question up.
    And now she was sounding him out again, poking him in the ribs to make him wake up, as she repeated:
    “Listen to me! Which do you like better, Veector? ‘In all Mexico there was no bur-r-ro as wise as Miguel’s Pedro,’ or ‘Miguel’s Pedro was the wisest bur-r-ro in all Mexico.’?”
    “I think—I like it the first way better.”
    “Which way is that?” demanded his mother, thumping her palm down on the illustration.
    Victor tried to remember the wording, but realized he was only staring at the pencil smudges, the thumbprints on the edges of his mother’s illustration board. The