the width of East Street, growing larger every
minute, until presently she was hemmed in. Here and there hoarse shouts
of approval and cheers arose in response to invisible orators haranging
their audiences in weird, foreign tongues; tiny American flags were
waved; and suddenly, in one of those unforeseen and incomprehensible
movements to which mobs are subject, a trolley car standing at the end
of the Hawthorne Street track was surrounded, the desperate clanging
of its bell keeping pace with the beating of Janet's heart. A dark
Sicilian, holding aloft the green, red, and white flag of Italy, leaped
on the rear platform and began to speak, the Slav conductor regarding
him stupidly, pulling the bellcord the while. Three or four policemen
fought their way to the spot, striving 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