traggling under
her hat and her fierce eyes holding back the tears, telling him
haughtily that a great cause made one indifferent to discomfort; and he
nearly laughed aloud. He looked across the hall at her and just caught
her switching her gaze from him to the platform. He felt a curious
swaggering triumph at the flight of her eyes.

But Mrs. Ormiston had begun to speak, and he, too, turned his attention
to the platform. He liked this old woman's invincible quality, the way
she had turned to and made a battering-ram of her own meagre middle-aged
body to level the walls of authority; and she reminded him of his
mother. There was no physical likeness, but plainly this woman also was
one of those tragically serious mothers in whose souls perpetual concern
for their children dwelt like a cloud. He thought of her as he had often
thought of his mother, that it was impossible to imagine her visited by
those morally blank moods of purely sensuous perception which were the
chief joy he had found in life. Such women never stood upright, lifting
their faces to the sunlight, smiling at the way of the wind in the
tree-tops; they seemed to be crouched down with ear to earth, listening
to the footsteps of the events which were marching upon their beloved.

The resemblance went no further than this spiritual attitude, for this
woman was second-rate stuff. Her beauty was somehow shoddy, her purple
gown the kind of garment that a clairvoyant might have worn, her
movements had the used quality of photographers' poses. Publicity had
not been able to change the substance of the precious metal of her soul,
but it had tarnished it beyond all remedy. She alluded presently to her
preposterously-named daughters, Brynhild, Melissa and Guendolen, and he
was reminded of a French family of musicians with whom he had travelled
on the steamer between Rio and Sao Paulo, a double-chinned swarthy
Madame and her three daughters, Celine, Roxane and Juliette, who sat
about on deck nursing musical instruments tied with grubby scarlet
ribbons, silent and dispirited, as though they were so addicted to
public appearance that they found their private hours an embarrassment.
But he remembered with a prick of compunction that they had made
excellent music; and that, after all, was their business in life. So
with the Ormistons. In the pursuit of liberty they had inadvertently
become a troupe; but they had fought like lions. And they were giving
the young that gua