'And peers!' called a voice.
'We are done with patience!' said Ernestine, hotly; 'and for that reason there is at last some hope for the women's cause. Now Miss Scammell will speak to you.'
A strange thing happened when Miss Scammell got up. She seemed to leave her attractiveness, such as it was, behind when she climbed up on the bench. Standing mute, on a level with the rest, her head deprecatingly on one side, she had pleased. Up there on the bench, presuming to teach, she woke a latent cruelty in the mob. They saw she couldn't take care of herself, and so they 'went for her'—the very same young men who had got up and given her a choice of the seats they had been at the pains to come early to secure. To be sure, when, with a smile, she had sat down only a quarter of an hour before, in the vacated place of one of them, the other boy promptly withdrew with his pal. It would have been too compromising to remain alongside the charmer. But when Miss Scammell stood up on that same bench, she was assumed to have left the realm of smiles and meaning looks where she was mistress and at home. She had ventured out into the open, not only without the sword of pointed speech—that falls to few—but this young lady had not even the armour of absolute earnestness. When she found that smiling piteously wouldn't do, she proceeded, looking more and more like a scared white rabbit, to tell about the horrible cases of lead-poisoning among the girls in certain china and earthenware works. All that she had to say was true and significant enough. But it was no use. They jeered and howled her down for pure pleasure in her misery. She trembled and lost her thread. She very nearly cried. Vida wondered that the little chairwoman didn't fly to the rescue. But Ernestine sat quite unmoved looking in her lap.
'Lamentable exhibition!' said Borrodaile, moving about uneasily.
The odd thing was that Miss Scammell kept on with her prickly task.
'Why don't you make her sit down?' Vida whispered to Miss Blunt.
'Because I've got to see what she's made of.'
'But surely you see! She's awful!'
'Not half so bad as lots of men when they first try. If she weathers this, she'll be a speaker some day.'