It was a little relief to get out of reach of the other’s hand. He stood up against the narrow little mantelpiece behind Spears’s chair. It was heaped with picture-frames, and the drawing which Spears had been making in the morning stood there propped up against the wall; the great foxglove from which he had designed it lay in a heap along with the other flowers which he had rejected, swept up into the fireplace. A faint odour of crushed stalks and broken flowers came from them. They were swept up carelessly with the dust, their bright petals peeping from under all the refuse of the shop, dishonoured and broken. Paul thought it was symbolical. He stood and looked--more dispassionately from a distance--at the rough, forcible head of the demagogue, and the countenance all seamed and grimy of the Scotsman, who was concentrating the keen light of his eyes upon Spears. The clerk, on the other hand, clean, neat, and commonplace, did not seem to belong to the same world, while the feeble, long head of Weaver was as the ghost and shadow of the other animated and vigorous faces. The light of the mean little paraffin lamp threw a yellow glow on them, but left in darkness all the corners of the shop, the large shuttered window, full of picture-frames, and the cavernous opening of the stairs which led to Spears’s house--and filled the place with an odour which the accustomed senses of the others took no notice of, but which to Paul was almost insupportable. He had assisted at these conferences before; but however he had busied himself in the details of the meetings, however earnestly and gravely he had posed (to his own consciousness) as one of them, yet he had never been one of them. He had been a spectator not an actor in the drama, little referred to, scarcely believed in by the others; and he had taken them calmly, as it is so easy to take those with whom we have nothing to do. But now that he was entirely committed to their society, now that he had burnt his ships, and shut every door of escape behind him, a new light seemed to shine upon them. The smoky lamp, the smell of the paraffin, the grimy haze about Fraser, the feeble whiteness of the other, the little clerk, all smooth and smug, with his talk of capital and interest--Paul seemed never to have seen them before. These were to be henceforward his companions, fellow-founders of a new society.