But to-night, as he listened to these voices, he felt again his old horror of the collective soul.  The voices spoke with a terrible unanimity.  The vortex—­the Vortex—­was like the little vortex of school.  The young men, Ellis and Mitchell and Monier-Owen belonged to a herd like the school-herd, hunting together, crying together, saying the same thing.  Their very revolt against the Old Masters was a collective and not an individual revolt.  Their chase was hottest when their quarry was one of the pack who had broken through and got away.  They hated the fugitive, solitary private soul.

And yet it was only as private souls that Ellis and Mitchell and Monier-Owen counted.  Each by himself did good things; each, if he had the courage to break loose and go by himself, might do a great thing some day.  Even George Wadham might do something if he could get away from Ellis and the rest.  Edward Rivers had had courage.

Michael thought:  “It’s Rivers now.  It’ll be my turn next” But he had a great longing to break loose and get away.

He thought:  “I don’t know where they’re all going to end.  They think they’re beginning something tremendous; but I can’t see what’s to come of it.  And I don’t see how they can go on like that for ever.  I can’t see what’s coming.  Yet something must come. They can’t be the end.”

He thought:  “Their movement is only a small swirl in an immense Vortex.  It may suck them all down.  But it will clear the air.  They will have helped to clear it.”

He thought of himself going on, free from the whirl of the Vortex, and of his work as enduring; standing clear and hard in the clean air.

PART III

VICTORY

XVIII

It was July, nineteen-fourteen, a month remarkable in the British Isles because of the fine weather and the disturbances in the political atmosphere due to the fine weather.

Every other evening in that July Anthony Harrison reminded his family that fine weather is favourable to open-air politics, and that the mere off-chance of sunstroke is enough to bring out the striker.  And when Michael asked him contentiously what the weather had to do with Home Rule, he answered that it had everything to do with it by increasing parliamentary blood-pressure.

“Wait,” he said, “till we get a good thunderstorm You’ll see how long the strike’ll last, and what Sir Edward Carson has to say to Mr. Redmond then.”

Anthony kept his head.  He had seen strikes before, and he knew that Home Rule had never been a part of practical politics and never would be.

And Michael and Dorothea laughed at him.  They had their own views about the Home Rule question and the Labor question, and they could have told Anthony what the answers were going to be; only they said it wasn’t any good talking to Father; when he got an idea into his dear old head it stuck there.