Why didn't she go on?
Why, except that she knew he was there, and was gaining time?
"Well, I guess she has shown herself," said the door-keeper, whose
discussion with Ransom now appeared to have passed, on his own part, and
without the slightest prejudice to his firmness, into a sociable,
gossiping phase.
"If she had shown herself, we should hear the reception, the applause."
"Well, there they air; they are going to give it to her," the policeman
announced.
He had an odious appearance of being in the right, for there indeed they
seemed to be--they were giving it to her. A general hubbub rose from the
floor and the galleries of the hall--the sound of several thousand
people stamping with their feet and rapping with their umbrellas and
sticks. Ransom felt faint, and for a little while he stood with his gaze
interlocked with that of the policeman. Then suddenly a wave of coolness
seemed to break over him, and he exclaimed: "My dear fellow, that isn't
applause--it's impatience. It isn't a reception, it's a call!"
The policeman neither assented to this proposition nor denied it; he
only transferred the protuberance in his cheek to the other side, and
observed:
"I guess she's sick."
"Oh, I hope not!" said Ransom, very gently. The stamping and rapping
swelled and swelled for a minute, and then it subsided; but before it
had done so Ransom's definition of it had plainly become the true one.
The tone of the manifestation was good-humoured, but it was not
gratulatory.
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