In the roar of applause which followed Maraton’s brilliant but wholly unprepared peroration, a roar which broke and swelled like the waves of the sea, different people upon the platform heard different things.  Peter Dale and his little band of coadjutors were men enough to know that a new force had come amongst them.  It is possible, even, that they, hardened as they were by time and circumstances, felt some thrill of that erstwhile enthusiasm which in their younger days had brought them out from the ranks of their fellows.  To Aaron, listening with quivering attention to every sentence, it seemed like the consummation of all his dreams.  Julia alone was conscious of a certain restraint, knew that behind all the deep feeling and splendid hopefulness of Maraton’s words, there was a sense of something kept back.  It wasn’t what he had meant to say.  Something had come between Maraton and his passionate dreams of freedom.  He, too, had become a particularist.  He, too, was content to preach salvation piecemeal.  He had spoken to them at first simply, as one worker to another.  Then he had drifted out into the larger sea, and for those few moments he had been, at any rate, vigorously in earnest as he had attacked with scorpion-like bitterness the hideous disproportions which existed between the capitalized corporation and the labour which supported it.  Yet afterwards he had gone back within himself.  Almost she had expected to see him with his hands upraised, bidding them tear down these barriers for themselves.  Instead he showed them the legalized way, not to free humanity, but to ensure for themselves a more comfortable place in life.  It was all very magnificent.  The strike was assured now, almost the success of it.

It was long before they let him leave the platform.  In the droning impotence of the men who followed him, the vast audience seemed to realise once more the splendid perfection of his wholly natural and inspiring oratory.  They rose and shouted for him, and once again, as he said a few words, the spell of silence lay upon them.  Julia sat telling herself passionately that all was well, that nothing more than this was to have been hoped for, that indeed the liberator had come.  More than once she felt Aaron’s hands gripping her arm, as Maraton’s words seemed to cleave a way towards the splendid truth.  Ross, on her other side, was like a man carried into another s world.

“It is the Messiah,” he muttered, “the Messiah of suffering men and women!  No longer will they cry aloud for bread and be given stones.”

Everything that happened afterwards seemed, in a way, commonplace.  When at last they succeeded in leaving the platform, they had to wait for a long time in an anteroom while some portion of the immense crowd dispersed.  Peter Dale, as soon as he had lit his pipe, came up to Maraton and patted him on the shoulder.

“There’s no doubt about thy gift, lad,” he said condescendingly.  “A man who can talk as you do has no need to look elsewhere for a living.”