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. . . .

How it had been accomplished, the thing she later felt, was beyond the