Paul acts the way he does because he has a sense that he was meant for better things than the meager life available to him on Cordelia Street. The story begins with him facing a disciplinary panel at his school; he is in trouble for being disrespectful, but his drawing master has a different insight -- "I don't really believe that smile of his comes altogether from insolence; there's something sort of haunted about it.......
Paul acts the way he does because he has a sense that he was meant for better things than the meager life available to him on Cordelia Street. The story begins with him facing a disciplinary panel at his school; he is in trouble for being disrespectful, but his drawing master has a different insight -- "I don't really believe that smile of his comes altogether from insolence; there's something sort of haunted about it.... There is something wrong about the fellow." Part of what is "wrong" is that Paul has an imagination that can't easily be controlled, and he longs for the fine life he sees second hand as an usher at Carnegie Hall. He will lie or do anything that will offer him a glimpse of that glamorous life. After one concert, he follows a famous opera singer to her hotel, gazing after her: when the singer entered the hotel "it seemed to Paul that he, too, entered. He seemed to feel himself go after her up the steps, into the warm, lighted building, into an exotic, tropical world of shiny, glistening surfaces and basking ease." This in stark contrast to his own home, and his domineering father, who terrifies him. Paul is suffocated by the middle class life he leads, and becomes desperate to get out, and find for himself the life he believes he is entitled to. That is why he steals the money and runs away -- he decides it is better to live a few days the way he thinks he was meant to, than spend a whole lifetime in fear and misery and self-loathing.
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