r. The crowd was
on its feet again, and the prisoners had risen in their high places.

Out of the three hundred and seventy-one, two hundred and seventy-nine
women and seven men were singing the Marching Song of the
Militant Women.

Shoulder to shoulder, breast to breast,
Our army moves from east to west.
Follow on! Follow on!

With flag and sword from south and north,
The sounding, shining hosts go forth.
Follow on! Follow on!

Do you not bear our marching feet,
From door to door, from street to street?
Follow on! Follow on!

Dorothea was fascinated and horrified by the singing, swaying, excited
crowd.

Her three aunts fascinated her. They were all singing at the top of
their voices. Aunt Louie stood up straight and rigid. She sang from the
back of her throat, through a mouth not quite sufficiently open; she
sang with a grim, heroic determination to sing, whatever it might cost
her and other people.

Aunt Edie sang inaudibly, her thin shallow voice, doing its utmost, was
overpowered by the collective song. Aunt Emmeline sang shrill and loud;
her body rocked slightly to the rhythm of a fantastic march. With one
large, long hand raised she beat the measure of the music. Her head was
thrown back; and on her face there was a look of ecstasy, of a holy
rapture, exalted, half savage, not quite sane.

Dorothea was fascinated and horrified by Aunt Emmeline.

The singing had threatened her when it began; so that she felt again her
old terror of the collective soul. Its massed emotion threatened her.
She longed for her white-washed prison-cell, for its hardness, its
nakedness, its quiet, its visionary peace. She tried to remember. Her
soul, in its danger, tried to get back there. But the soul of the crowd
in the hail below her swelled and heaved itself towards her, drawn by
the Vortex. She felt the rushing of the whirlwind; it sucked at her
breath: the Vortex was drawing her, too; the powerful, abominable thing
almost got her. The sight of Emmeline saved her.

She might have been singing and swaying too, carried away in the same
awful ecstasy, if she had not seen Emmeline. By looking at Emmeline she
saved her soul; it stood firm again; she was clear and hard and sane.

She could look away from Emmeline now. She saw her brothers, Michael and
Nicholas. Michael's soul was the prey of its terror of the herd-soul.
The shrill voices, fine as whipcord and sharp as