One of them who, seemed to be the leader—he wore a uniform coat something like a volunteer's coat—stepped to the front and called upon them all to form. Then with a loud voice he led off a hymn, in which all joined as they marched down the street.
He was hatless, and his cheek was bleeding from an open wound. Yet he looked undaunted, and his hymn was a song of triumph. A wild-set-up young fellow with thick black hair and black beard, but pale cheeks. His forehead was square and firm; his eyes were black and fierce.
"Good heavens!" cried Harry. "It is my cousin Tom, captain in the Salvation Army. And that, I suppose, is his regiment. Well, if standing still to be kicked means a victory, they have scored one to-night."
The pavement was even more crowded than in the morning. The political agitators bawled more fiercely than in the forenoon to their circle of apathetic listeners; the preachers exhorted the unwilling more fervently to embrace the faith. Cheap-jacks was dispensing more volubly his two penn'orths of "sassaple." The workmen lounged along, with their pipes in their mouths, more lazily than in the morning. The only difference was that the shop-boys were now added to the crowd, every lad with a "twopenny smoke" between his lips; and that the throng was increased by those who were going home from church.
"Let us, too, go home," said Angela; "there is too much humanity here; we shall lose ourselves among the crowd."
CHAPTER XIII. ANGELA'S EXPERIMENT.
"No, Constance," Angela wrote, "I cannot believe that your lectures will be a failure, or that your life's work is destined to be anything short of a brilliant success—an 'epoch-making' episode in the history of Woman's Rise. If your lectures have not yet attracted reading men, it must be because they are not yet known. It is unworthy of faith in your own high mission to suppose that personal appearance or beauty has anything to do with popularity in matters of mind. Who asks—who can ask?—whether a woman of genius is lovely or not? And to take lower ground: every woman owns the singular attractiveness of your own face, which has always seemed to me, apart from personal friendship, the face of pure intellect. I do not give up my belief that the men will soon begin to run after your lectures as they did after those of Hypatia, and yet will become in the University as great a teacher of mathematics as Sir Isaac Newton himself. Meantime, it must be, I own, irksome to lecture on vulgar fractions, and the First Book of Euclid, and unsatisfactory to find, after you have made a research and arrived at what seemed a splendid result, that some man has been before you. Patience, Constance!"
At this point the reader, who was of course Constance Woodcote, paused and smiled bitterly. She was angry because she had advertised a course of lectures on some desperately high mathematical subject and no one came to hear them. Had she been, she reflected, a pink-and-white girl with no forehead and soft eyes, everybody would have rushed to hear her. As it was, Angela, no doubt, meant well, but she was always disposed to give men credit for qualities which they did not possess. As if you could ever persuade a man to regard a woman from a purely intellectual point of view! After all, she thought, civilization was only just begun; we live in a world of darkness; the reign of woman is as yet afar off. She continued her reading with impatience. Somehow, her friends seemed to have drifted away; their lines were diverging; already the old enthusiasms had given place to the new, and Angela thought less of the great cause which she had once promised to further with her mighty resources.