If Paul Kegworthy had been of the same fibre as the little Buttons, he would have felt, thought and acted as they, and this history would never have been written.  He would have grown up to man’s estate in the factory and have been merged an indistinguishable unit in the drab mass of cloth-capped humans who, at certain hours of the day, flood the streets of Bludston, and swarm on the roofs of clanging and shrieking tramcars, and on Saturday afternoons gather in clotted greyness on the football ground.  He might have been sober and industrious-the proletariat of Bludston is not entirely composed of Buttons-but he would have taken the colour of his environment, and the world outside Bludston would never have heard of him.  Paul, however, differed greatly from the little Buttons.  They, children of the grey cap and the red shawl, resembled hundreds of thousands of little human rabbits similarly parented.  Only the trained eye could have identified them among a score or two of their congeners.  For the most part, they were dingily fair, with snub noses, coarse mouths, and eyes of an indeterminate blue.  Of that type, once blowsily good-looking, was Mrs. Button herself.  But Paul wandered a changeling about the Bludston streets.  In the rows of urchins in the crowded Board School classroom he sat as conspicuous as any little Martian who might have been bundled down to earth.  He had wavy black hair, of raven black, a dark olive complexion, flushed, in spite of haphazard nourishment and nights spent on the stone floor of the reeking scullery, with the warm blood of health, great liquid black eyes, and the exquisitely delicate features of a young Praxitelean god.  It was this preposterous perfection which, while redeeming him from ridiculous beauty by giving his childish face a certain rigidity, differentiated him outwardly from his fellows.  Mr. Button, to whom the unusual was anathema, declared that the sight of the monstrosity made him sick, and rarely suffered him in his presence; and one day Mrs. Button, discovering him in front of the cracked mirror in which Mr. Button shaved, when his hand was steady enough, on Sunday afternoons, smote him over the face with a pound of rump steak which she happened to be carrying, instinctively desirous not only to correct her son for vanity, but also to spoil the comeliness of which he might be vain.

Until a wonderful and illuminating happening in his eleventh year, little Paul Kegworthy had taken existence with the fatalism of a child.  Of his stepfather, who smelt lustily of sour beer, bad tobacco and incidentally of other things undetected by Paul’s nostrils, and whom he saw rarely, he dwelt in mortal terror.  When he heard of the Devil, at Sunday school, which he attended, to his stepfather’s disgust, he pictured the Prince of Darkness not as a gentleman, not even as a picturesque personage with horns and tail, but as Mr. Button.  As regards his mother, he had a confused idea that he was a living blight