they should be carried out. He would have thought it no harm to kill a
priest, but it seemed to him contemptible to receive a priest's money
for providing the church with vessels which were to serve in a worship
he despised.

Moreover, he was not poor. Indeed, he was richer than any one knew, and
the large sums paid for his matchless work went straight from the
workshop to the bank, while Marzio continued to live in the simple
lodgings to which he had first brought home his wife, eighteen years
before, when he was but a young partner in the establishment he now
owned. As he sat at the bench, looking from his silver ewer to the green
lampshade, he was asking himself whether he should not give up this life
of working for people he hated and launch into that larger work of
political agitation, for which he fancied himself so well fitted. He
looked forward into an imaginary future, and saw himself declaiming in
the Chambers against all that existed, rousing the passions of a
multitude to acts of destruction--of justice, as he called it in his
thoughts--and leading a vast army of angry men up the steps of the
Capitol to proclaim himself the champion of the rights of man against
the rights of kings. His eyelids contracted and the concentrated light
of his eyes was reduced to two tiny bright specks in the midst of the
pupils; his nervous hand went out and the fingers clutched the jaws of
the iron vice beside him as he would have wished to grapple with the
jaws of the beast oppression, which in his dreams seemed ever tormenting
the poor world in which he lived.

There was something lacking in his face, even in that moment of secret
rage as he sat alone in his workroom before the lamp. There was the
frenzy of the fanatic, the exaltation of the dreamer, clearly expressed
upon his features, but there was something wanting. There was everything