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.

457

The Man Who Laughs