, with a taller companion, whom he identified as the pair he had
noticed on the night of the story-telling. The little gasfitter was
clearly all nervous fidget and expectation; the other, large and gaunt
in figure, with a square impassive face, and close-shut lips that had a
perpetual mocking twist in the corners, stood beside him like some
clumsy modern version, in a commoner clay, of Goethe's 'spirit that
denies.'

Robert came forward with a roll of papers in his hand.

His first words were hardly audible. Rose felt her colour rising, Lady
Charlotte glanced at her nephew, the standing group of men cried, 'Speak
up!' The voice in the distance rose at once, braced by the touch of
difficulty, and what it said came firmly down to them.

In after days Flaxman could not often be got to talk of the experience
of this evening. When he did he would generally say, briefly, that as an
_intellectual_ effort he had never been inclined to rank this first
public utterance very high among Elsmere's performances. The speaker's
own emotion had stood somewhat in his way. A man argues better, perhaps,
when he feels less.

'I have often heard him put his case, as I thought, more cogently in
conversation,' Flaxman would say--though only to his most intimate
friends--'but what I never saw before or since was such an _effect of
personality_ as he produced that night. From that moment, at any rate, I
loved him, and I understood his secret!'

Elsmere began with a few words of courteous thanks to the club for the
hearing they had promised him.

Then he passed on to the occasion of his address--the vogue in the
district of 'certain newspapers which, I understand, are specially
relished and patronised by your association.'

And he laid down on a table beside him the copies of the _Freethinker_
and of _Faith and Fools_ which he had brought with him, and faced his
audience again, his hands on his sides.

'Well! I am not here to-night to attack those newspapers. I want to
reach your sympathies if I can in another way. If there is anybody here
who takes pleasure in them, who thinks that such writing and such
witticisms as he gets purveyed to him in these sheets do really help the
cause of truth and intellectual freedom, I shall not attack his position
from the front. I shall try to undermine it. I shall aim at rousing in
him such a state of feeling as may suddenly convince him that what is
injured by writing of this sort is not the orthodox