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