He was so happy that he felt compassion for the men around him.  He pitied the rest of the world.  It was, besides, his instinct to look about him, because no one is always consistent, and a man’s nature is not always theoretic; he was delighted to live within an enclosure, but from time to time he lifted his head above the wall.  Then he retreated again with more joy into his loneliness with Dea, having drawn his comparisons.  What did he see around him?

What were those living creatures of which his wandering life showed him so many specimens, changed every day?  Always new crowds, always the same multitude, ever new faces, ever the same miseries.  A jumble of ruins.  Every evening every phase of social misfortune came and encircled his happiness.

The Green Box was popular.

Low prices attract the low classes.  Those who came were the weak, the poor, the little.  They rushed to Gwynplaine as they rushed to gin.  They came to buy a pennyworth of forgetfulness.  From the height of his platform Gwynplaine passed those wretched people in review.  His spirit was enwrapt in the contemplation of every succeeding apparition of widespread misery.  The physiognomy of man is modelled by conscience, and by the tenor of life, and is the result of a crowd of mysterious excavations.  There was never a suffering, not an anger, not a shame, not a despair, of which Gwynplaine did not see the wrinkle.  The mouths of those children had not eaten.  That man was a father, that woman a mother, and behind them their families might be guessed to be on the road to ruin.  There was a face already marked by vice, on the threshold of crime, and the reasons were plain—­ignorance and indigence.  Another showed the stamp of original goodness, obliterated by social pressure, and turned to hate.  On the face of an old woman he saw starvation; on that of a girl, prostitution.  The same fact, and although the girl had the resource of her youth, all the sadder for that!  In the crowd were arms without tools; the workers asked only for work, but the work was wanting.  Sometimes a soldier came and seated himself by the workmen, sometimes a wounded pensioner; and Gwynplaine saw the spectre of war.  Here Gwynplaine read want of work; there man-farming, slavery.  On certain brows he saw an indescribable ebbing back towards animalism, and that slow return of man to beast, produced on those below by the dull pressure of the happiness of those above.  There was a break in the gloom for Gwynplaine.  He and Dea had a loophole of happiness; the rest was damnation.  Gwynplaine felt above him the thoughtless trampling of the powerful, the rich, the magnificent, the great, the elect of chance.  Below he saw the pale faces of the disinherited.  He saw himself and Dea, with their little happiness, so great to themselves, between two worlds.  That which was above went and came, free, joyous, dancing, trampling under foot; above him the world which treads, below the world which