parterre_, jealous for the reputation of their fellow-citizen, broke
forth into stormy protest. And Richard could have found it in his heart
to protest also. For it was waste of energy, this senseless conflict!
It was unworthy of the dignity of that dull-coloured multitude, on whom
his hopes were so strangely set--of the men in whose hands are the
final rewards and punishments, by whose voice the final judgment is
pronounced. It pained him to see these ministers of the Eternal Justice
thus led away by trivial happenings, and their attention distracted
from the main issue. For what, in God's name, did he and his
sentimental love-carrollings amount to, this pretty fellow of a player,
this fictitious hero of the modern, Neapolitan, operatic stage? Weighed
in the balances, he and his whole occupation and calling were lighter,
surely, than vanity itself? Rightly considered, he and his singing were
but as a spangle, as some glittering trifle of tinsel, upon the veil
still hiding the awful, yet benign, countenance of that tremendous and
so surely approaching event.--Let him sing away, then, sing in peace.
For the sound of his singing might help to lighten the weariness of the
hours until the supreme hour should strike, and the glittering veil be
torn asunder, and the countenance it covered be at last and wholly
revealed.

Reasoning thus, Richard raised his opera glasses and swept those many
superimposed ranges of waxen cells. And the aspect of them was to him
very sinister, for everywhere he seemed to encounter soft, voluptuous,
brainless faces, violences of hot colour, and costly clothing cunningly
devised to heighten the physical allurements of womanhood. Everywhere,
beside and behind these, he seemed to encounter the faces of men,
gluttonous of pleasure, hungering for those generously-discovered,
material charms. They were veritable antechambers of vice, those
angular-mouthed, waxen cells. And, therefore, very fittingly, as he
reflected, he had his place in one of them, since he was infected by
the vices, active partaker in the sensuality, of his class.--Oh! that
the bees would swarm--swarm, and make short work of it all, inflict
completeness of punishment, and thereby cleanse him and set him free!
In its intensity his longing came near taking the form of articulate
prayer.

And then his thought shifted once more, attaching itself curiously,
speculatively, to individual objects. For his survey of the house had
just now br