But there had been in the air that morning something more than the white sunlight.  There had been anticipation.  And at two o’clock began fulfilment.  The forges were stilled, and from court and alley forth came the women.  In their ragged working clothes, in their best clothes—­so little different; in bonnets, in hats, bareheaded; with babies born and unborn, they swarmed into the high street and formed across it behind the band.  A strange, magpie, jay-like flock; black, white, patched with brown and green and blue, shifting, chattering, laughing, seeming unconscious of any purpose.  A thousand and more of them, with faces twisted and scored by those myriad deformings which a desperate town-toiling and little food fasten on human visages; yet with hardly a single evil or brutal face.  Seemingly it was not easy to be evil or brutal on a wage that scarcely bound soul and body.  A thousand and more of the poorest-paid and hardest-worked human beings in the world.

On the pavement alongside this strange, acquiescing assembly of revolt, about to march in protest against the conditions of their lives, stood a young woman without a hat and in poor clothes, but with a sort of beauty in her rough-haired, high cheek-boned, dark-eyed face.  She was not one of them; yet, by a stroke of Nature’s irony, there was graven on her face alone of all those faces, the true look of rebellion; a haughty, almost fierce, uneasy look—­an untamed look.  On all the other thousand faces one could see no bitterness, no fierceness, not even enthusiasm; only a half-stolid, half-vivacious patience and eagerness as of children going to a party.

The band played; and they began to march.

Laughing, talking, waving flags, trying to keep step; with the same expression slowly but surely coming over every face; the future was not; only the present—­this happy present of marching behind the discordance of a brass band; this strange present of crowded movement and laughter in open air.

We others—­some dozen accidentals like myself, and the tall, grey-haired lady interested in “the people,” together with those few kind spirits in charge of “the show”—­marched too, a little self-conscious, desiring with a vague military sensation to hold our heads up, but not too much, under the eyes of the curious bystanders.  These—­nearly all men—­were well-wishers, it was said, though their faces, pale from their own work in shop or furnace, expressed nothing but apathy.  They wished well, very dumbly, in the presence of this new thing, as if they found it queer that women should be doing something for themselves; queer and rather dangerous.  A few, indeed, shuffled along between the column and the little hopeless shops and grimy factory sheds, and one or two accompanied their women, carrying the baby.  Now and then there passed us some better-to-do citizen-a housewife, or lawyer’s clerk, or ironmonger, with lips pressed rather tightly together and an air of taking no notice of this disturbance of traffic, as though the whole thing were a rather poor joke which they had already heard too often.