While around him crowded the others, like insects upon which he had been destined to fatten. As he looked about him, with the slow, languorous eye movement of a resting bull, he felt the exaltation and conceit of a conqueror at the hour of victory. An intelligent being, gifted with such strength and the power to analyse his sensations, would have said: “This is the greatest moment of my life.” But Gypo did not think. There was nothing about him in relation to which he could think. A queen will not dream of flaunting her beauty and her raiment at a boors’ banquet. But she will, on a public holiday, bow to their clamorous cheers. So with Gypo. The cumbersome mechanism of his mind had been put in motion that evening by the necessity for forming a plan after leaving the police-station. The unaccustomed strain had unmoored it. It floundered about until Gallagher’s promise perched it on a foolish eminence whence it regarded the rest of humanity with contempt. It sprawled its ponderous foundations on that crazy eminence as arrogantly as if it were about to rest there for eternity. He rolled his eyes about at the heads that were standing thickly around him, some on a level with his biceps, some on a level with his waist, while here and there a tall man like himself, stood with a red, lean, knotted neck strained forward, with throbbing throat, towards the food counter. “Biga lot o’ people,” murmured the Italian suddenly, making a polite gesture with his hands to indicate the number of people present and the nature of his suspicions. “That’s all right,” muttered Gypo. “Count ’em as ye hand out the grub. I’ll pay. Don’t you fret yersel’. Keep back there.” He had been standing with his palms against the edge of the marble-topped counter. Now, in order to put his hand into his right trousers pocket, he had to pick up a small-sized man and crush him in between two women, who leaned away behind their shawls. Then he thrust his hand into his pocket and fingered the wad of Treasury notes. The very touch of them sent a wave of remembrance through his body. A slight tremor ran up, almost tangibly like a breath of cold wind in a hot place, up the extent of his body until it entered his brain. The remembrance of the origin of that wad of notes staggered him momentarily. He remembered the fat white hand, surmounted by a carefully brushed blue sleeve, that had handed him the wad over a desk, saying ever so icily: “You’ll find twenty pounds there. Go.”