He stopped abruptly, and stood quite still a moment, fronting the meeting, as though appealing to them, through the mere squalid physical weakness he could find no more words to express. Then, with a sort of shambling bow, he turned away, and the main body of the meeting clapped excitedly, while at the back some of the "sweaters" grinned, and chatted sarcastic things in Yiddish with their neighbours. Tressady saw Lady Maxwell rise eagerly as the old man passed her, take his hand, and find him a seat. "That, I suppose, was an emotion," said Tressady, looking down upon his companion. "Or an argument," said Watton--"as you like!" One other "emotion" of the same kind--the human reality at its simplest and cruellest--Tressady afterwards remembered. A "working-woman" was put up to second an amendment condemning the workshops clause, which had been moved in an angry speech by one of "Fontenoy's ladies," a shrill-voiced, fashionable person, the secretary to the local branch of the Free Workers' League. Tressady had yawned impatiently through the speech, which had seemed to him a violent and impertinent performance. But as the speaker sat down he was roused by an exclamation from a man beside him. "_That_ woman!" cried a tall curate, straining on tiptoe to see. "No! They ought to be ashamed of themselves!" Tressady wondered who and why; but all that he saw was that a thin, tall woman was being handed along the bench in front of him, while her neighbours and friends clapped her on the back as she passed, laughing and urging her on. Then, presently, there she stood on the platform, a thin, wand-like creature, with her battered bonnet sideways on her head, a woollen crossover on her shoulders, in spite of July, her hands clasped across her chest, her queer light eyes wandering and smiling hither and thither. In her emaciation, her weird cheerfulness, she was like a figure from a Dance of Death. But what was amazing was her self-possession. "Now yer laffin' at me," she began in a conversational tone, nodding towards the group of women she had just left. "You go 'long! I told the lidy I'd speak, an I will. Well, they comes to me, an they ses, Mrs. Dickson, yer not to work at 'ome no longer--they'll put yer in prison if yer do't, they ses; yer to go out ter work, same as the shop 'ands, they ses; and what's more, if they cotch Mr. Butterford--that's my landlord; p'raps yer dunno 'im--" She looked down at the meeting with a whimsical grin, her eyes screwed up and her crooked brows lifted, so that the room roared merely to look at her. The trim lady-secretary, however, bent forward with an air of annoyance. She had not, perhaps, realised that Mrs. Dickson was so much of a character.