For the first time in his life the King formed part of a crowd, and knew what it was like to feel his body and limbs packed in by the bodies and limbs of others and to have the breath squeezed out of him. In this crowd the proportion of men to women was as ten to one; from the physical point of view, therefore, the chances for these conflicting women were nil. All the same they were there in large numbers, and not for the first time; many of them were already sufficiently well known to the police. A curiously corporate movement possessed this crowd; when it shifted at all it shifted in large sections--three or four hundred at once; a whole street-width of men driving forward at a lunge, before which the strongest barrier of police momentarily gave way. And wherever this kind of movement went on a few women formed the center of it. Small bundles of humanity, they shot by in the grip of that huge force, mischievous and uncontrolled; tossed, tousled, and squeezed, shedding as they went small fragments of their outer raiment, lost momentarily to view in the surging mass of men, cornered, crushed back, held down as within a vise--emerging again like popped corks followed by a foaming rush of shouting youths, jeering or cheering them on; and still through all that pressure obstinately retaining their human form, and enduring with a strange silence what was being done to them by this great roaring mob which had come out "for fun." Some went their way wide-eyed, with terror in their looks, yet still set to their end; some with rigid faces and eyes shut fast, as though scarcely conscious--their souls elsewhere, submitting passively to the buffetings of fate; and a few--strangest sight of all--smiling to themselves, almost with a look of peace, as though in the very violence by which they were assailed they discerned a triumph for their cause. And with all the screwing, pushing, and wrenching, the driving forward and the hurling back, scarcely one woman's arm was raised, except now and again to protect her breast from the lewd or wanton assaults of the crowd. Some held, tight clasped in their hands, crumpled bits of paper--the petition, presumably, over which all this trouble arose--stained, torn, almost illegible now, useless, yet still a symbol of the fight that was being waged. Now and then above the turmoil, in the dimness that lay between the lighted streets and the crowning darkness of night, went sudden flashes like sheet-lightning in storm; and at the stroke horses plunged, and youths screamed, facetiously imitating the voice of women. It was the work of photographers, securing, from some point of vantage overhead, flashlight records for the delectation of the music halls. Again and again, with pistol-like report, the monstrous dose was administered, the night took it at a gulp, and the rabble responded with noise and shoutings. The genial voice of a mounted policeman working his way through the crowd sounded humanly above the din.