louder roar, the origin of which was
presently made apparent.

He turned a corner and saw before him a huge crowd, and Regency Row
packed with seething humanity from end to end.

III

For the first time in his life the King formed part of a crowd, and knew
what it was like to feel his body and limbs packed in by the bodies and
limbs of others and to have the breath squeezed out of him. In this
crowd the proportion of men to women was as ten to one; from the
physical point of view, therefore, the chances for these conflicting
women were nil. All the same they were there in large numbers, and not
for the first time; many of them were already sufficiently well known to
the police.

A curiously corporate movement possessed this crowd; when it shifted at
all it shifted in large sections--three or four hundred at once; a whole
street-width of men driving forward at a lunge, before which the
strongest barrier of police momentarily gave way. And wherever this kind
of movement went on a few women formed the center of it.

Small bundles of humanity, they shot by in the grip of that huge force,
mischievous and uncontrolled; tossed, tousled, and squeezed, shedding as
they went small fragments of their outer raiment, lost momentarily to
view in the surging mass of men, cornered, crushed back, held down as
within a vise--emerging again like popped corks followed by a foaming
rush of shouting youths, jeering or cheering them on; and still through
all that pressure obstinately retaining their human form, and enduring
with a strange silence what was being done to them by this great roaring
mob which had come out "for fun."

Some went their way wide-eyed, with terror in their looks, yet still set
to their end; some with rigid faces and eyes shut fast, as though
scarcely conscious--their souls elsewhere, submitting passively to the
buffetings of fate; and a few--strangest sight of all--smiling to
themselves, almost with a look of peace, as though in the very violence
by which they were assailed they discerned a triumph for their cause.

And with all the screwing, pushing, and wrenching, the driving forward
and the hurling back, scarcely one woman's arm was raised, except now
and again to protect her breast from the lewd or wanton assaults of the
crowd. Some held, tight clasped in their hands, crumpled bits of
paper--the petition, presumably, over which all this trouble
arose--stained, torn, almost illegible now, useless, yet st