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.