Edwardes followed him, in response to the invitation for suggestions: a little be-spectacled Labour man whose ideal was a world of committees. There had been something alive about Faraday’s outpouring; it was the speech of a man who, however resentfully, understood that the world had moved. But as Edwardes quacked earnestly about branch propaganda as an antidote to militarism and a means of diffusing the international idea, the sense of unreality descended again upon William. Branch propaganda—little leaflets and meetings—when guns made a pulp of flesh and blood, and men were being shot against walls! Resolutions in minute-books against wrongs like Griselda’s and his own! For the first time for many days he felt a desire to laugh, and, if it had not been for his sense of the distant unreality of the proceedings, perhaps he would have been moved to actual expression of perverted and unmirthful mirth. It was young Jay-Blenkinsop who made the proceedings real to him; and, but for his intervention at the end of the discussion, it is probable that William himself would have taken no part in it. He would have listened for a little, perhaps to the end, and then crept out to his loneliness; but Jay-Blenkinsop roused him and swept him out of himself ... Edwardes quacked earnestly for ten minutes or so: the aggrieved outpourings of a soul to which the really serious fact of the war was that it had caused a certain amount of backsliding and even desertion amongst the weaker brethren of his branch; and when he sat down, after a moment of silence, Jay-Blenkinsop rose to his feet. (In the dark ages that had ended a week ago William thought highly of Edgar Jay-Blenkinsop, esteeming him a youth of great promise.) With his hands in his pockets, his broad shoulders lolled against the wall and his hair, as usual, drooped over an eyebrow, he drawled out fine scorn upon the leaders of the Labour Party for their treachery to the cause of the People and their lack of the sense of Brotherhood. There was no particular purport in his vaguely scathing remarks, which (the meeting being nominally for business purposes) might well have been ruled out of order; but he was enjoying the sound of his own full voice and his mother gazed up at him admiringly.