Mark André ’s Reviews > A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man > Status Update

—Devil out of hell! We won! We crushed him to death! Fiend!
The door slammed behind her.
Mr. Casey, freeing his arms from his holders, suddenly bowed his head on his hands with a sob of pain.
—Poor Parnell! he cried loudly. My dead king!
He sobbed loudly and bitterly.
Stephen, raising his terrorstricken face, saw his father’s eyes were full of tears.

There was a cold night smell in the chapel. But it was a holy smell. It was not like the smell of the old peasants who knelt at the back of the chapel at Sunday mass. That was a smell of air and rain and Turk and corduroy. But they were very holy peasants. They breathed on the back of his neck and sighed as they prayed.

Soon they would be going home for the holidays. After supper in the studyhall he would change the number pasted up inside his desk from seventyseven to seventysix.