When he had first seen the painter behind the glass, the boy had been attracted by his quick, nervous movements; he had stopped and idly looked on. Gradually, he had become aware of the subject of the painting: the hula dancer and, above her, already completed on the upper third of the pane, a strip of tropical island with palm trees in the foreground. The careful, swift glide of the painter's hand, the caressing smear of the color, the emergence of the dancer's body, induced reverie in the boy. The street noises blended and withdrew, a warm feeling stole through him. With sleepy eyes, in an adolescent haze, the boy stood there, head lifted, face a bit sullen in repose, mouth slightly pouting. He was languorous and aloof in his red shirt among the others shabbily clad. The skin on his throat was soft, shadowed with little hollows where muscles played.

By this time the group of spectators had grown: a dozen men clustered on the wet sidewalk. Passersby would linger for a moment, then go on; in a car parked beside the curb a man sat with his arm across the steering wheel. Customers entered the bar. When they came out, they usually paused in the doorway to watch the painter.

He had now filled in with flesh color the outline of the torso and was drawing his brush slowly around the hip. To steady his hand he used a rod with a clothwrapped ball at one end that rested against the glass. Whenever the brush passed over the black outline, he quickly removed the superfluous paint with a rag that he kept hanging over his left wrist. Once, with a little gesture of annoyance, he wiped away the entire buttocks and twirled a finer brush in black to renew the outline. Then, after an unwavering and commendable stroke, he leaned back to consider not without pleasure what he had done, glancing for the first time at the men outside.

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