But through his manner and his confusion of language there had emerged some passion of feeling which, as he spoke, formed in the majority of the audience a little picture or an idea which each now was eager to give expression to.

Most of the people there proposed to spend their lives in the practice either of writing or painting, and merely by looking at them it could be seen that, as they listened to Mr.Purvis first, and then to Mr.Greenhalgh, they were seeing something done by these gentlemen to a possession which they thought to be their own.

One person after another rose, and, as with an ill-balanced axe, attempted to hew out his conception of art a little more clearly, and sat down with the feeling that, for some reason which he could not grasp, his strokes had gone awry.

As they sat down they turned almost invariably to the person sitting next them, and rectified and continued what they had just said in public.

Before long, therefore, the groups on the mattresses and the groups on the chairs were all in communication with each other, and Mary Datchet, who had begun to darn stockings again, stooped down and remarked to Ralph: "That was what I call a first-rate paper." Both of them instinctively turned their eyes in the direction of the reader of the paper.