. And it was the effect of these last that affected Richard
oddly, displeasingly, as, helped by Powell and Andrews,--the first
footman, who acted as his table-steward on board the _Reprieve_,--he
made his way slowly down to the chair, placed on the left, at the front
of the box. For the accepted aspects and relations of things seen were
remote to him. He perceived effects, shapes, associations of colour,
divorced from their habitual significance. It was as though he looked
at the written characters of a language unknown to him, observing the
form of them, but attaching no intelligible meaning to that form. And
so it happened that those many superimposed tiers of boxes were to him
as the waxen cells of a gigantic honeycomb, against the angular
darknesses of which little figures, seen to the waist, took the
light--the blond face, neck and arms of some woman, the fair colours of
her dress--and showed up with perplexing insistence. For they were all
peopled, these cells of the honeycomb, and--so it seemed to him--with
larvae, bright-hued, unworking, indolent, full-fed. Down there upon the
_parterre_, in the close-packed ranks of students, of men and women of
the middle-class, soberly attired in walking costume, he recognised the
working bees of this giant hive. By their unremitting labour the dainty
waxen cells were actually built up, and those larvae were so amply, so
luxuriously, fed. And the working bees--there were so many, so very
many of them! What if they became mutinous, rebelled against labour,
plundered and destroyed the indolent, succulent larvae of which he--yes,
he, Richard Calmady--was unquestionably and conspicuously one?

He leaned back in his chair, pulled forward the velvet drapery so as to
shut out the view of the house, and fixed his eyes upon the heads of
the musicians in the orchestra. The overture was nearly over. The
curtain would very soon go up. Then he observed that Powell still stood
near him. The man was strangely officious to-day, he thought. Could
that be connected in any way with the fact he had had his hair cut? For
a moment the notion appeared to Dickie quite extravagantly amusing. But
he kept his amusement, as so much else, to himself. And again the
working bees, down in the _parterre_, attracted his attention. They
were buzzing, buzzing angrily, displeased with the full-fed larvae in
the boxes, because these last were altogether too social, talked too
loud and too continuously, drowning th