Martin Birck's Youth by Hjalmar Soderberg

It was dark in the house, and Martin had pushed up the slatted shutters of the box. No one could see them, nor from where he sat in his corner could he see anything of what was happening on the stage. He only heard lines and responses thrown out in the dark, and saw, or fancied he saw, their effects on the curving rows of pale human masks -- a sloping flower bed full of large curious flowers, colorless as are plants that grow without sunlight, and not exactly beautiful as they waved gently, as if before an inaudible wind, or nodded on their stems from time to time.

He imagined he could recognize them all, whether because he had really met them so often on the street and in public places, where he had been one of them, that their faces had become fixed in his subconscious memory; or because of the tendency of human faces to group themselves into a few types, so that one rarely seems to encounter a really new face.