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The Short Story Club

What happened to the main character of the story, Paul, a troubled, neurotic teenager who lives in his own dreams and refuses to face the reality is an illustration of the worst case. Paul might have had psychological problems (depression, etc.) but, apparently, there are other circumstances that contributed to the fatal outcome. Paul was a motherless child and his father probaly lost or never had a connection with his son until the latter alienated himself from his family, school and his surroundings altogether.
Paul never got the help he needed, nobody tried to teach him to appreciate simple things or explain to him that in the long run the best things in life are free. Nobody tried to talk to him or just understand him. He was desperately lonely and the only emotions his attitude and behaviour triggered were indignation and irritation.

'Paul entered the faculty room suave and smiling. His clothes were a trifle out-grown, and the tan velvet on the collar of his open overcoat was frayed and worn; but for all that there was something of the dandy about him, and he wore an opal pin in his neatly knotted black four-in-hand, and
a red carnation in his button-hole. This latter adornment the faculty somehow felt was not properly significant of the contrite spirit befitting a boy under the ban of suspension. Paul was tall for his age and very thin, with high, cramped shoulders and a narrow chest. His eyes were remarkable for a certain hysterical brilliancy, and he continually used them in a conscious, theatrical sort of way, peculiarly offensive in a boy.
The pupils were abnormally large, as though he were addicted to belladonna, but there was a glassy glitter about them which that drug does not produce.'