--so
little different; in bonnets, in hats, bareheaded; with babies born and
unborn, they swarmed into the high street and formed across it behind the
band. A strange, magpie, jay-like flock; black, white, patched with
brown and green and blue, shifting, chattering, laughing, seeming
unconscious of any purpose. A thousand and more of them, with faces
twisted and scored by those myriad deformings which a desperate
town-toiling and little food fasten on human visages; yet with hardly a
single evil or brutal face. Seemingly it was not easy to be evil or
brutal on a wage that scarcely bound soul and body. A thousand and more
of the poorest-paid and hardest-worked human beings in the world.

On the pavement alongside this strange, acquiescing assembly of revolt,
about to march in protest against the conditions of their lives, stood a
young woman without a hat and in poor clothes, but with a sort of beauty
in her rough-haired, high cheek-boned, dark-eyed face. She was not one
of them; yet, by a stroke of Nature's irony, there was graven on her face
alone of all those faces, the true look of rebellion; a haughty, almost
fierce, uneasy look--an untamed look. On all the other thousand faces
one could see no bitterness, no fierceness, not even enthusiasm; only a
half-stolid, half-vivacious patience and eagerness as of children going
to a party.

The band played; and they began to march.

Laughing, talking, waving flags, trying to keep step; with the same
expression slowly but surely coming over every face; the future was not;
only the present--this happy present of marching behind the discordance
of a brass band; this strange present of crowded movement and laughter in
open air.

We others--some dozen accidentals like myself, and the tall, grey-haired
lady interested in "the people," together with those few kind spirits in
charge of "the show"--marched too, a little self-conscious, desiring with
a vague military sensation to hold our heads up, but not too much, under
the eyes of the curious bystanders. These--nearly all men--were
well-wishers, it was said, though their faces, pale from their own work
in shop or furnace, expressed nothing but apathy. They wished well, very
dumbly, in the presence of this new thing, as if they found it queer that
women should be doing something for themselves; queer and rather
dangerous. A few, indeed, shuffled along between the column and the
little hopeless shops and grimy factory she