That little girl Ellen Melville was lovelier stuff because she was at grips with the world.  This woman had magnificent smooth wolds of shoulders and a large blonde dignity; but life was striking sparks of the flint of Ellen’s being.  There came before him the picture of her as she had been that day in Princes Street, with the hairs straggling 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 guarantee that life is really as fine as storybooks say, which can only be given by contemporary heroism.  Little Ellen Melville, on the other side of the hall, was lifting the most wonderful face all fierce and glowing with hero-worship.  “That’s how I used to feel about Old Man Guthrie of the Gondomar when I was seventeen,” he thought.  “It’s a good age....”