ht of asking whether the monstrous man who almost
filled and broke the balcony was the great President of whom the others
stood in awe. He knew it was so, with an unaccountable but instantaneous
certainty. Syme, indeed, was one of those men who are open to all the
more nameless psychological influences in a degree a little dangerous
to mental health. Utterly devoid of fear in physical dangers, he was a
great deal too sensitive to the smell of spiritual evil. Twice already
that night little unmeaning things had peeped out at him almost
pruriently, and given him a sense of drawing nearer and nearer to the
head-quarters of hell. And this sense became overpowering as he drew
nearer to the great President.

The form it took was a childish and yet hateful fancy. As he walked
across the inner room towards the balcony, the large face of Sunday grew
larger and larger; and Syme was gripped with a fear that when he was
quite close the face would be too big to be possible, and that he would
scream aloud. He remembered that as a child he would not look at the
mask of Memnon in the British Museum, because it was a face, and so
large.

By an effort, braver than that of leaping over a cliff, he went to an
empty seat at the breakfast-table and sat down. The men greeted him
with good-humoured raillery as if they had always known him. He sobered
himself a little by looking at their conventional coats and solid,
shining coffee-pot; then he looked again at Sunday. His face was very
large, but it was still possible to humanity.

In the presence of the President the whole company looked sufficiently
commonplace; nothing about them caught the eye at first, except that
by the President's caprice they had been dressed up with a festive
respectability, which gave the meal the look of a wedding breakfast. One
man indeed stood out at even a superficial glance. He at least was the
common or garden Dynamiter. He wore, indeed, the high white collar and
satin tie that were the uniform of the occasion; but out of this
collar there sprang a head quite unmanageable and quite unmistakable, a
bewildering bush of brown hair and beard that almost obscured the eyes
like those of a Skye terrier. But the eyes did look out of the tangle,
and they were the sad eyes of some Russian serf. The effect of this
figure was not terrible like that of the President, but it had every
diablerie that can come from the utterly grotesque. If out of that stiff
tie and collar t