Now and again during this period Philip went to have a few words with an old Bridgeway School friend of his who worked in one of the coat and mantle factories bordering the Mitchen. It was an experience which lifted his Socialism from a theory and a somewhat sentimental abstraction to a clamant and immediate need. "Sweated labour" became a phrase which he could endow with the actual physical associations it was intended to conjure. He saw the men in their filthy shirts spitting upon their pressing-irons and the floor indiscriminately. Their sweat fell unregarded on the material below them. The tailors sitting about on the littered tables seemed to be more perversions of men, grotesques, than men actually. The windows were fouled with an opaque mist of dirt and sweat. Little boys shuffled uneasily about like subterranean gnomes. Girls cackled hideously after him, and when the men started an obscene catch which lifted his gorge, girl after girl in the adjoining rooms accepted the sexual challenge and cackled in return. He saw a thick-nosed foreman whose waistcoat glimmered evilly with countless soup droppings fuddling his fingers in the bosom of a girl. He saw another girl, a recent recruit, leaning, ivory-yellow, through a window which looked down on the Mitchen slime. There was no reason why her body should not follow where her eyes looked down so stupidly. What else was there? Nothing but the reeking room and the dirty songs and the swinish waistcoat of the foreman! The picture of this sick girl remained abidingly with him. When Harry turned suddenly to him one evening and announced that he had given Philip's name to the Longton secretary as a speaker for next Sunday evening, at the very moment of dismay and revolt her image came back to him and filled him with a blind fury against the ordinances of men. "All right, I'll come!" he said thickly. "You know I'll make a filthy mess of it, but that's your fault. I've got nothing to say and I don't know how to say it and I'll just get up and open my mouth and shut it and fall off. Good God, Harry Sewelson, you're a pig!" "And you're a good Socialist! There's two first-rate lies. It's on the croft outside Longton Park. But don't worry, Philip, old man, you've got the stuff, never fear! Sunday, May the something-or-other, is the date. Anyhow, that doesn't matter, it's next Sunday, at half-past six! So that's all right!" Philip carefully prepared a little speech. He repeated it several times before his mother, assuring her that it was one of Antony's many orations over the corpse of Cæsar. So long as Philip did not declaim loud enough to wake Reb Monash she was happy enough to listen obediently to Antony's denunciation of the House of Lords. Next Sunday Philip turned up and sat below the oratorial cart biting his nails nervously and recapitulating his speech. He was called upon immediately after an emancipated coal-heaver, whose jocosity had tickled the crowd into unrest.