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nounced the young man. The audience was not yet warmed up,
because too few numbers had been called for anyone to be on the
verge of winning. Cornelius, however, also had this third
number and was pleased no little by the course of events.
"Forty-nine!" announced the young man.
"Raspberries!" cried the same voice from the balcony.
"Please!" said the young man in a tone of unctious and
good-natured irony, "1 must ask you to restrain yourself, my
dear friend in the balcony. Otherwise we will be forced to
suppose that you are intoxicated, and since there are more
suitable places than this for those in that state, we will have
to
ask you to leave. Your money will be refunded."
"I won't go. I've been kicked out of better places than this,"
said the balcony voice. The young master of ceremonies sig–
nalled to one of the ushers, indicating the necessity of action.
Cornelius had paid little attention to the disturbance, for the
number forty-nine was on his card also. He needed only one
more number in order to win, and was enormously excited. He
felt that something was about to go wrong; good fortune was
always too precarious, too contingent, too arbitrary an event to
be, in truth, good fortune.
Non forat ullum illaesa felicitas,
(unbroken prosperity is unable to bear any evil, if 1 have
translated Seneca correctly). The disturbance from the balcony
impressed him immediately as a possible source of reversal and
he turned a resentful face toward the balcony, faced forward
again, and waited for the pointer to turn again.
It
did.
"Eight!" cried the young master of ceremonies. A hasty
glance convinced Cornelius that he did not have the num–
ber. Two more chances to win the big prize, and buy fifty vol–
umes in the Loeb Classical Library. The pointer turned weakly
this time.
"Fourteen!" cried the young man into the microphone
which made his voice even more official than otherwise. Cornel–
ius did not have the number. He assured himself that the game
was a fraud, that the management was obviously not going to
permit anyone to win so much money and that the whole
business would obviously be controlled in the projection room
or by arranging the numbers on the cards. There was only one
