ularly ferocious aspect, and not unlike the
headsman in certain Renaissance pictures which represent executions,
tortures, and the like, advanced upon him with an implacable air to take
his 'things.' But the harshness of his steely glare was compensated by
the softness of his cotton gloves, so effectively that, as he approached
Swann, he seemed to be exhibiting at once an utter contempt for his
person and the most tender regard for his hat. He took it with a care to
which the precision of his movements imparted something that was almost
over-fastidious, and with a delicacy that was rendered almost touching
by the evidence of his splendid strength. Then he passed it to one of
his satellites, a novice and timid, who was expressing the panic that
overpowered him by casting furious glances in every direction, and
displayed all the dumb agitation of a wild animal in the first hours of
its captivity.

A few feet away, a strapping great lad in livery stood musing,
motionless, statuesque, useless, like that purely decorative warrior
whom one sees in the most tumultuous of Mantegna's paintings, lost in
dreams, leaning upon his shield, while all around him are fighting and
bloodshed and death; detached from the group of his companions who were
thronging about Swann, he seemed as determined to remain unconcerned in
the scene, which he followed vaguely with his cruel, greenish eyes, as
if it had been the Massacre of the Innocents or the Martyrdom of Saint
James. He seemed precisely to have sprung from that vanished race--if,
indeed, it ever existed, save in the reredos of San Zeno and the
frescoes of the Eremitani, where Swann had come in contact with it, and
where it still dreams--fruit of the impregnation of a classical statue
by some one of the Master's Paduan models, or of Albert Duerer's Saxons.
And the locks of his reddish hair, crinkled by nature, but glued to his
head by brilliantine, were treated broadly as they are in that Greek
sculpture which the Mantuan painter never ceased to study, and which,
if in its creator's purpose it represents but man, manages at least to
extract from man's simple outlines such a variety of richness, borrowed,
as it were, from the whole of animated nature, that a head of hair,
by the glossy undulation and beak-like points of its curls, or in the
overlaying of the florid triple diadem of its brushed tresses, can
suggest at once a bunch of seaweed, a brood of fledgling doves, a bed of
hyacinths