to clear the tracks, bewildered and impotent in the face of the
alien horde momentarily growing more and more conscious of power.

Janet pushed her way deeper and deeper into the crowd. She wanted to
savour to the full its wrath and danger, to surrender herself to be
played upon by these sallow, stubby-bearded exhorters, whose menacing
tones and passionate gestures made a grateful appeal, whose wild, musical
words, just because they were uncomprehended, aroused in her dim
suggestions of a race-experience not her own, but in which she was now
somehow summoned to share. That these were the intruders whom she, as a
native American, had once resented and despised did not occur to her. The
racial sense so strong in her was drowned in a sense of fellowship. Their
anger seemed to embody and express, as nothing else could have done, the
revolt that had been rising, rising within her soul; and the babel to
which she listened was not a confusion of tongues, but one voice lifted
up to proclaim the wrongs of all the duped, of all the exploited and
oppressed. She was fused with them, their cause was her cause, their
betrayers her betrayers.

Suddenly was heard the cry for which she had been tensely but
unconsciously awaiting. Another cry like that had rung out in another mob
across the seas more than a century before. "Ala Bastille!" became "To
the Chippering!" Some man shouted it out in shrill English, hundreds
repeated it; the Sicilian leaped from the trolley car, and his path could
be followed by the agitated progress of the alien banner he bore. "To the
Chippering!" It rang in Janet's ears like a call to battle. Was she
shouting it, too? A galvanic thrill ran through the crowd, an impulse
that turned their faces and started their steps down East Street toward
the canal, and Janet was irresistibly carried along. Nay, it seemed as if
the force that second by second gained momentum was in her, that she
herself had released and was guiding it! Her feet were wet as she
ploughed through the trampled snow, but she gave no thought to that. The
odour of humanity was in her nostrils. On the left a gaunt Jew pressed
against her, on the right a solid Ruthenian woman, one hand clasping her
shawl, the other holding aloft a miniature emblem of New World liberty.
Her eyes were fixed on the grey skies, and from time to time her lips
were parted in some strange, ancestral chant that could be heard above
the shouting. All about Janet were dark, a