While she was bargaining Smith would often stop to listen to some street-corner orator haranguing the multitude—the multitude consisting, as a rule, of a few apathetic onlookers, workingmen with one hand round the bowl of a pipe and the other in a trouser pocket. “The typical English attitude,” Blampied commented afterwards, “good-humored, tolerant, vaguely skeptical—skeptical just as much of the truth as of lies. What a lot it will take to move men like that, but when they do move—they ever move—what a cataclysm!”
