If there was more to the telegram, no one but the reader knew. The clamor was like a stretching of hands across the miles to New York, to clasp those other hands in their brother-lust. The youth of twenty flung himself free of those who had held him, and dropped to the floor, and sat hugging his knees and staring out over the hall as if death sat there, infinitely repeated, and naked.
The Chairman lifted his hand. “You have heard the motion. Does any one desire to hear it re-read?”
Again that amazing, pulsing, unanimity of the cry:
“Question! Question! Question!”
“All those in favor—” the Chairman’s bent head was raised so that he peered at them from under his lids—“will make it manifest by saying ‘ay.’”
Out of the depth of their experience and practice at meetings for charity, for philanthropy, for church, for state, for home, they voted, so that it was like One Great Thing with a voice of its own.
“Ay!”
In this “ay” the Inger’s voice boomed out so that some remembered and wondered, and even in that moment, a few turned to see him.
“Those opposed will make it manifest by saying ‘no.’”
The boy sprang to his feet, and with the clear call of a few hundred no’s, his own voice rang out in agony: