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 needles, tortured him.  Michael looked beautiful in his martyrdom.  His fair, handsome face was set clear and hard.  His yellow hair, with its hard edges, fitted his head like a cap of solid, polished metal.  Weariness and disgust made a sort of cloud over his light green eyes.  When Nicky looked at him Nicky’s face twitched and twinkled.  But he hated it almost as much as Michael hated it.

She thought of Michael and Nicholas.  They hated it, and yet they stuck it out.  They wouldn’t go back on her.  She and Lady Victoria Threlfall were to march on foot before the Car of Victory from Blackfriars Bridge along the Embankment, through Trafalgar Square and Pall Mall and Piccadilly to Hyde Park Corner.  And Michael and Nicholas would march beside them to hold up the poles of the standard which, after all, they were not strong enough to carry.

She thought of Drayton who had not stuck it out.  And at the same time she thought of the things that had come to her in her prison cell.  She had told him the most real thing that had ever happened to her, and he had not listened.  He had not cared.  Michael would have listened.  Michael would have cared intensely.