central gangway, bold in her desire for a perfect hearing and slipped into a seat in the second row of chairs. The chairman was taking his place and in the dying down of conversation she heard a quiet flurry of draperies approaching with delicate apologetic rhythm up the gangway. It was the tall young woman. She passed, a veiled figure with bent head and floating scarf, along the little passage between the front row of the audience and the fern-edged platform, upon which she presently emerged, taking her place next to a lady who now rose and came forward, tall and black robed, and whose face, sharply pointing beneath the shadow of a plumy hat, had the expression of an eagle searching the distance with calm piercing eyes. In rousing ringing grievous tones she begged to be allowed to precede the chairman with an important announcement. Miriam inwardly groaned as the voice chid tragically on, demanding a realisation on the part of all, of the meaning for London of the promised arrival in its midst of a world-famed authority in Greek letters. She felt the audience behind her quelled into absolute stillness, and took angry refuge in the cover of her syllabus. “The Furthermore Settlement,” she read, printed boldly at the head of the page. It was one of those missions; to bring culture amongst the London poor … “devoted young men from the Universities.” Those girls in the corridor, wrapped in their code, were doing “settlement work.” They did not look philanthropic. What they loved most was the building, the grey stone corridors and archways, and being away from home on a prolonged adventure, free to weave bright colours along the invisible edges of life. She could not imagine them ever becoming in the least like the elderly philanthropists on the platform. But they were not free. The place was a sort of monastery of culture. If they wore habits they would be free and deeply inspiring. But they went about dressed longingly in the colours of sunlit landscapes, and lived their social life with ideas. There was something monastic about the lofty hall, with its neutral tinted walls and high-placed windows. But the place was modern and well-ventilated, even sternly chilly. Turning on her shoulder to examine the dutiful audience, she was startled by its effect of massed intellectuality. These people were certainly not the poor of the neighbourhood. By far the larger number were men, and wherever she looked she met faces from which she turned quickly away lest she should smile her pleasure. Even those that were heavy with stoutness and beards had the same lit moving look of kindly adventurous thought. They were a picked gathering; like the Royal Institution; but more glowing. She turned back to the platform in high hope amidst the outburst of applause greeting the retirement of the distressful lady and deepening to enthusiasm as there emerged timidly from behind one of the large platform screens a tall figure in evening dress, a great grown-up boy, with a large fresh face and helpless straight hanging arms and hands. He sat big and fixed, like an idol, whilst the chairman standing bowing over his table hurriedly remarked that an introduction was superfluous, and gazed at the audience with large moist blue eyes that seemed permanently open and expressionless and yet to pray for protection, or permission to retreat once more behind his screen. Miriam pitied him from the bottom of her heart and saw with relief when he rose that he produced a roll of papers for which a little one-legged ecclesiastical reading desk was conveniently waiting. He was going to read. But he placed his papers with large incapable fingers and she feared they would flutter to the ground, till he turned and took one fumbling expressionless step clear of the little desk and standing just as he was, his arms hanging once more heavy and helpless at his side, his eyes motionlessly fixed neither on the distance nor on any part of the audience, as if sightlessly focusing everything before him, began, without movement, or warning gesture, to speak. With the first sound of his voice, Miriam surrendered herself to breathless listening. It sounded out, at conversational pitch, with a colourless serenity that instantly explained his bearing, revealing him beyond the region either of diffidence or temerity. It was a voice speaking to no one, in a world emptied of everything that had gone before.
“The progress of philosophy,” went the words, in letters of gold across the dark void “is by a series of systems; that of science by the constant addition of small facts to accumulated knowledge.” In the slight pause Miriam held back from the thoughts flying out in all directions round the glowing words, they would come again, if she could memorise the words from which they were born, coolly, registering the shape and length of the phrases and the leading terms. Before the voice began again she had read and reread many times; driving back an exciting intruder trying, from the depths of her mind to engage her on the subject of the time-expanding swiftness of thought.
“A system,” pursued the voice “very generally corrects the fallacy of the preceding system, and leans perhaps in the opposite direction.” She flushed warm beneath the pressure of her longing to remain cool … “Thus the movements of philosophic thought may be compared to the efforts of a drunken man to reach his home.” The blue eyes remained unaltered, while the large fresh face expanded with a smiling radiance. He was a darling. “He reels against the wall to his right and gains an impetus which sends him staggering to the left and so on; his progress being a series of zigzags. But in the end he gets home. And we may hope that philosophy will do the same, though the road seems at times unnecessarily broad.”
He turned back to his papers, leaving his sentence on the air in an intense silence
