Marriott had suffered his first defeat. He looked at the jury. A change had taken place; these twelve men no longer impressed him as an institution grown old and gray with the waste of ages. They no longer held for him any symbolic meaning; little by little, during the long, tedious hours, individualities had developed, the idea of unity had receded. Seen thus closely and with increasing familiarity, the formal disappeared, the man emerged from the mass, and Marriott found himself face to face with the personal equation. He sat with one arm thrown over the back of his chair and looked at them, watching, as it were, this institution disintegrate into men, merely; men without the inspiration of noble ideals, swayed by primitive impulses, unconsciously responsive to the obscure and mysterious currents of human feeling then flowing through the minds of the people, generating and setting in motion vague, terrible and irresistible powers. He could feel those strange, occult currents moving in him--he must set himself against them that he might stand, though all alone, for the ignorant boy whose soul had strayed so far. He studied the faces of the twelve men, trying to discover some hope, some means of moving and winning them. There was old McGiffert, who alone of all the first venire had withstood the mutations of the last four days, sitting serene and triumphant, sure of his two dollars a day, utterly unconscious of the grave and tragic significance of the responsibilities he had been so anxious to assume. There was Osgood, the contractor, a long row of cigars, a tooth-brush, and a narrow comb sticking out of his waistcoat pocket; Duncan, with his short sandy hair covering sparsely a red scalp that moved curiously when he uttered certain words; Foley, constantly munching his tobacco, as he had been doing for sixty years, so that when he spoke he did so with closed lips; Slade, the man with the rough red face, who found, as Marriott had at first thought, amusement in everything, for he smiled often, showing his gums and a row of tiny unclean teeth; there was Grey, constantly moving his false teeth about in his mouth; Church, with thin gray hair, white mustache and one large front tooth that pressed into his lower lip; and then Menard, the grocer’s clerk, wearing black clothes that long ago had passed out of fashion; his sallow, thin, unhealthy face wearing an expression of fright. Marriott recalled how uncertain Menard had been in his notions about capital punishment; how, at first, he had said he was opposed to it, and how at last, under Glassford’s metaphysical distinctions, the boy had declared that he would do his duty. Marriott had been encouraged, thinking that Menard’s natural impulses might reassert themselves, but now, alas, he recognized that Menard in the hands of other men would be but the putty he so much resembled. Then there were Reder, the gray old German, and Chisholm and McCann, the aged