And here they were!  The audience made a tumult that was half applause and half exclamation at a prodigy, and the three women who made their way on the platform seemed to be moving through the noise as through a viscid element.  The woman doctor, who was to be the chairman, lowered her curly grey head against it buttingly; Mrs. Ormiston, the mother of the famous rebels Brynhild, Melissa, and Guendolen, and herself a heroine, lifted a pale face where defiance dwelt among the remains of dark loveliness like a beacon lit on a grey castle keep; and Mrs. Mark Lyle, a white and golden wonder in a beautiful bright dress, moved swimmingly about and placed herself on a chair like a fastidious lily choosing its vase.  Oh! it was going to be lovely!  Wasn’t it ridiculous of that man Yaverland to have stayed away and missed all this glory, to say nothing of wasting a good half-crown and a ticket which someone might have been glad of?  It just showed that men were hopeless and there was no doing anything for them.

But then suddenly she saw him.  He was standing at one of the entrances on the other side of the hall, looking tremendous and strange in a peaked cap and raindashed oilskins, as though he had recently stood on a heeling deck and shouted orders to cutlassed seamen, and he was staring at the tumult as if he regarded noise as a mutiny of inferiors against his preference for calm.  By his side a short-sighted steward bent interminably over his ticket.  “The silly gowk!” fumed Ellen.  “Can the woman not read?  It looks so inefficient, and I want him to think well of the movement.”  Presently, with a suave and unimpatient gesture, he took his ticket away from the peering woman and read her the number.  “I like him!” said Ellen.  “There’s many would have snapped at her for that.”

She liked, too, the way he got to his seat without disturbing his neighbours, and the neathandedness with which he took off his cap and oilskins and fell to wiping a pair of motor-goggles while his eyes maintained a dark glance, too intense to flash, on the women on the platform.  “How long he is looking at them!” she said to herself presently.  “No doubt he is taken up by Mrs. Mark Lyle.  I believe such men are very susceptible to beautiful women.  I hope,” she continued with sudden bitterness, “he is as susceptible to spiritual beauty and will take heed of Mrs. Ormiston!” With that, she tried herself to look at Mrs. Ormiston, but found she could not help watching the clever way he went on cleaning the goggles while his eyes and attention were fixed otherwhere.  There was something ill-tempered about his movements which made her want to go dancingly across and say teasing things to him.  Yet when a smile at some private thought suggested by the speech broke his attention, and he began to look round the hall, she was filled with panic at the prospect of meeting his eyes.  She did not permit herself irrational emotions, so she pretended that what she was feeling was not terror of this man, but the anger of a feminist against all men, and stared fiercely at the platform, crying out silently:  “What have I to do with this man?  I will have nothing to do with any man until I am great.  Then I suppose I will have to use them as pawns in my political and financial intrigues.”