He turned back to his papers, leaving his sentence on the air in an intense silence through which Miriam felt the eager expectancy of the audience flow and hang waiting, gathered towards the fresh centre whence, unless he suddenly vanished, would come, through the perfect medium of the unobstructive voice, his utmost presentation of reasons for the tantalising hope.
At the end of the lecture she sat hurriedly sorting and re-sorting what she had gleaned; aware that her attention had again and again wandered off with single statements that had appealed to her, longing to communicate with other members of the audience in the hope of filling up the gaps. Perhaps the questions would bring back some of the things she had missed. But no one seemed to have anything to ask. The relaxation of the hearty and prolonged applause, had given way to the sort of silence that falls in a room after vociferous greetings, when the anticipated occasion vanishes and the gathered friends become suddenly unrecognisably small and dense. She looked at the woman at her side and caught a swift responsive glance that shocked her, clear blue and white and remote in limpid freshness though it was, with its chill understanding familiarity. Something had gone irrevocably from the evening and from herself. The strange woman was exactly like somebody … a disguise of somebody. Shattering the silence came a voice from the back of the hall. “If the lecturer thinks , and seems to deprecate the fact, that theology deals with metaphysical problems in an unmetaphysical way, that is, from the point of view of metaphysic, in an unscientific way. …” compared to Dr. McHibbert’s his voice was like the voice of an intoxicated man arguing to himself in a railway carriage. … “may we not say that when metaphysic takes upon itself to criticise the validity of scientific conceptions, it does so, from the point of view of science in an unscientific way?”