He went on steadily, comparing the moderation of the women with the red-hot violence of their Chartist forbears—till one half-drunken listener, having lost the thread, hiccuped out—
'Can't do nothin'—them women. Even after we've showed 'em 'ow!'
'Has he got his history right?' Vida asked through her smiling at the last sally. 'Not that it applies, of course,' she was in haste to add.
'Oh, what does it matter?' Her sister waved it aside. 'An unscrupulous politician hasn't come here to bother about little things like facts.'
'I don't think I altogether agree with you there. That man may be a fanatic, but he's honest, I should say. Those Scotch peasants, you know——'
'Oh, because he's rude, and talks with a burr, you think he's a sort of political Thomas Carlyle?'
Though Vida smiled at the charge, something in her alert air as she followed the brief recapitulation of the Chartist story showed how an appeal to justice, or even to pity, may fail, where the rousing of some dim sense of historical significance (which is more than two-thirds fear), may arrest and even stir to unsuspected deeps. The grave Scotsman's striking that chord even in a mind as innocent as Vida's, of accurate or ordered knowledge of the past, even here the chord could vibrate to a strange new sense of possible significance in this scene '——after all.' It would be queer, it would be horrible, it was fortunately incredible, but what if, 'after all,' she were ignorantly assisting at a scene that was to play its part in the greatest revolution the world had seen? Some such mental playing with possibilities seemed to lurk behind the intent reflective face.
'There are far too many voters already,' her sister had flung out.
'Yes—yes, a much uglier world they want to make!'
But in the power to make history—if these people indeed had that, then indeed might they be worth watching—even if it were only after one good look to hide the eyes in dismay. That possibility of historic significance had suddenly lifted the sordid exhibition to a different plane.