The great man, growing sure of his ground, made an eloquent appeal to the records of the past. The woman, who had never heard a politician speak before, leaned forward, hanging on every word. She felt strangely elated, strangely sure of herself, now. This man, believing all that about liberty, seeing all that behind the commonplace of democracy, should surely understand where others had failed even to tolerate. She felt disproportionately irritated by the click of knitting-needles, wondering how any woman could occupy mind and fingers with wool while eternal principles of justice were being thundered over her head. Then there came a pause in the thunder; and sight and sound were blotted out as she took the opportunity, rose to her feet, and stared up blindly at the spot where she knew the speaker to be standing. "Then give all that to the women," she said, in a voice she never seemed to have heard before. "If you think so much of justice and freedom for men, don't keep it any longer from the women." For a little space of time, a couple of seconds, probably, her eyes went on seeing nothing, and her ears drummed. She thought she had never known what it really meant to be alone until that moment. She was a woman who had known loneliness very early, when it came to her in an uncongenial nursery; she knew it still, in some houses, where everything was wrong, from the wall-papers to the people. But the meaning of utter isolation she had never learnt until that moment when clamour and confusion reigned around her and she saw and heard none of it. Then her senses were invaded by the sound and the look of it all; and to her own perplexity she found herself on the point of smiling.