"You are hurt. Why?"
Emmanuel refused to answer. Olivier pressed him kindly. The boy persisted in his silence: but his jaw trembled as though he were on the point of weeping. Olivier took his arm and led him back to his rooms. Although he too had the cruel and instinctive feeling of repulsion from ugliness and disease that is in all who are not born with the souls of sisters of charity, he did not let it appear.
"Some one has hurt you?"
"Yes."
"What did they do?"
The boy laid bare his heart. He said that he was ugly. He said that his comrades had told him that their revolution was not for him.
"It is not for them, either, my boy, nor for us. It is not a single day's affair. It is all for those who will come after us."
The boy was taken aback by the thought that it would be so long deferred.
"Don't you like to think that people are working to give happiness to thousands of boys like yourself, to millions of human beings?"
Emmanuel sighed and said: