“Are George and Sally here?” Eleanor exclaimed.

“Hodder,” said Phil, “is converting the heathen.  You couldn’t have kept George away.  And it was George who made Sally stay!”

Presently they found themselves established between a rawboned young workingman who smelled strongly of soap, whose hair was plastered tightly against his forehead, and a young woman who leaned against the wall.  The black in which she was dressed enhanced the whiteness and weariness of her face, and she sat gazing ahead of her, apparently unconscious of those who surrounded her, her hands tightly folded in her lap.  In their immediate vicinity, indeed, might have been found all the variety of type seen in the ordinary street car.  And in truth there were some who seemed scarcely to realize they were not in a public vehicle.  An elaborately dressed female in front of them, whose expansive hat brushed her neighbours, made audible comments to a stout man with a red neck which was set in a crease above his low collar.

“They tell me Eldon Parr’s pew has a gold plate on it.  I wish I knew which it was.  It ain’t this one, anyway, I’ll bet.”

“Say, they march in in this kind of a church, don’t they?” some one said behind them.

Eleanor, with her lips tightly pressed, opened her prayer book.  Alison’s lips were slightly parted as she gazed about her, across the aisle.  Her experience of the Sunday before, deep and tense as it had been, seemed as nothing compared to this; the presence of all these people stimulated her inexpressibly, fired her; and she felt the blood pulsing through her body as she contrasted this gathering with the dignified, scattered congregation she had known.  She scarcely recognized the church itself . . .  She speculated on the homes from which these had come, and the motives which had brought them.

For a second the perfume of the woman in front, mingling with other less definable odours, almost sickened her, evoking suggestions of tawdry, trivial, vulgar lives, fed on sensation and excitement; but the feeling was almost immediately swept away by a renewed sense of the bigness of the thing which she beheld,—­of which, indeed, she was a part.  And her thoughts turned more definitely to the man who had brought it all about.  Could he control it, subdue it?  Here was Opportunity suddenly upon him, like a huge, curving, ponderous wave.  Could he ride it? or would it crush him remorselessly?

Sensitive, alert, quickened as she was, she began to be aware of other values:  of the intense spiritual hunger in the eyes of the woman in black, the yearning of barren, hopeless existences.  And here and there Alison’s look fell upon more prosperous individuals whose expressions proclaimed incredulity, a certain cynical amusement at the spectacle:  others seemed uneasy, as having got more than they had bargained for, deliberating whether to flee . . . and then, just as her suspense was becoming almost unbearable, the service began. . . .