was a long
table, with benches beside it, and a round-backed chair at each end;
other seats were ranged along the walls. At the upper end of the room
an arrangement of dirty red hangings--in the form of a canopy,
surmounted by a lion and unicorn, of pasteboard--showed that festive
meetings were regularly held here. Round about were pictures of hunting
incidents, of racehorses, of politicians and pugilists, interspersed
with advertisements of beverages. A piano occupied one corner.

The chairman was already in his place; on the table before him was a
soup-plate, into which each visitor threw a contribution on arriving.
Seated on the benches were a number of men, women, and girls, all with
pewters or glasses before them, and the air was thickening with smoke
of pipes. The beneficiary of the evening, a portly person with a face
of high satisfaction, sat near the chairman, and by him were two girls
of decent appearance, his daughters. The president puffed at a
churchwarden and exchanged genial banter with those who came up to
deposit offerings. Mr. Dick Perkins, the Vice, was encouraging a spirit
of conviviality at the other end. A few minutes after Thyrza and her
companions had entered, a youth of the seediest appearance struck
introductory chords on the piano, and started off at high pressure with
a selection of popular melodies. The room by degrees grew full. Then
the chairman rose, and with jocular remarks announced the first song.

Totty had several acquaintances present, male and female; her laughter
frequently sounded above the hubbub of voices. Thyrza, who had declined
to have anything to drink, shrank into as little space as possible; she
was nervous and self-reproachful, yet the singing and the uproar gave
her a certain pleasure. There was nothing in the talk around her and
the songs that were sung that made it a shame for her to be present.
Plebeian good-humour does not often degenerate into brutality at
meetings of this kind until a late hour of the evening. The girls who
sat with glasses of beer before them, and carried on primitive
flirtations with their neighbours, were honest wage-earners of factory
and workshop, well able to make themselves respected. If they lacked
refinement, natural or acquired, it was not their fault; toil was
behind them and before, the hours of rest were few, suffering and lack
of bread might at any moment come upon them. They had all thrown their
hard-earned pence into the soup-plat