As for the angels on the chalices, he did not hate them; on the contrary, he saw in them the reflection of those vague images of loveliness and innocence which haunt every artist’s soul at times, and the mere manual skill necessary to produce expression in things so minute, fascinated a mind accustomed to cope with difficulties, and so inured to them as almost to love them.

Nevertheless, when a man is constantly a prey to strong emotions, his nature cannot long remain unchanged.  The conviction had been growing in Marzio’s mind that it was his duty, for the sake of consistency, to abandon his trade.  The thought saddened him, but the conclusion seemed inevitable.  It was absurd, he repeated to himself, that one who hated the priests should work for them.  Marzio was a fanatic in his theories, but he had something of the artist’s simplicity in his idea of the way 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 there except the force to accomplish, the initiative which oversteps the bank of words, threats, and angry thoughts, and plunges boldly into the stream, ready to sacrifice itself to lead others.  The look of power, of stern determination, which is never absent from the faces of men who change their times, was not visible in the thin dark countenance of the silver-chiseller.  Marzio was destined never to rise above the common howling mob which he aspired to lead.