seemed not to know what to make of her. She grew white; she wavered.
Tressady saw that she was making great efforts, and all in vain. The
division between her and her audience widened with every sentence, and
Fontenoy's lady-organiser, in the background, sat smilingly erect.
Tressady, who had been at first inclined to hate the thought of her
success in this Inferno, grew hot with wrath and irritation. His own
vanity suffered in her lack of triumph.

Amazing! How _could_ her personal magic--so famous on so many
fields--have deserted her like this in an East End schoolroom, before
people whose lives she knew, whose griefs she carried in her heart?

Then an idea struck him. The thought was an illumination--he understood.
He shut his eyes and listened. Maxwell's sentences, Maxwell's
manner--even, at times, Maxwell's voice! He had been rehearsing to her
his coming speech in the House of Lords, and she was painfully repeating
it! To his disgust, Tressady saw the reporters scribbling away--no doubt
they knew their business! Aye, there was the secret. The wife's adoration
showed through her very failure--through this strange conversion of all
that was manly, solid, and effective in Maxwell, into a confused mass of
facts and figures, pedantic, colourless, and cold!

Edward Watton began to look desperately unhappy. "Too long," he said,
whispering in Tressady's ear, "and too technical. They can't follow."

And he looked at a group of rough factory-girls beginning to scuffle with
the young men near them, at the restless crowd of "greeners," at the
women in the centre of the hall lifting puzzled faces to the speaker, as
though in a pain of listening.