1 The audience subsided again, and Jurgis sat back.
2 The audience came to its feet with a yell; men waved their arms, laughing aloud in their excitement.
3 He leaned over, reaching out for his audience; he pointed into their souls with an insistent finger.
4 And so, at last, when the meeting broke up, and the audience started to leave, poor Jurgis was in an agony of uncertainty.
5 At eleven the meeting closed, and the desolate audience filed out into the snow, muttering curses upon the few traitors who had got repentance and gone up on the platform.
6 But suddenly he stood up again, and Jurgis heard the chairman of the meeting saying that the speaker would now answer any questions which the audience might care to put to him.
7 Speaking had been going on all the time, and the audience was clapping its hands and shouting, thrilling with excitement; and little by little the sounds were beginning to blur in Jurgis's ears, and his thoughts were beginning to run together, and his head to wobble and nod.
8 Also the artist's audience of the present was a small minority of people, all debased and vulgarized by the effort it had cost them to win in the commercial battle, of the intellectual and artistic activities which would result when the whole of mankind was set free from the nightmare of competition, we could at present form no conception whatever.