The noise reached him before the last step, forty conversations starting at once, as if a valve had opened somewhere behind him.
Elias did not look back at it. He had held the field for the length of a speech, and he had known the whole time what that would cost: attention taken had to be paid out somewhere, and here it would come out as crowding. The speech was the smallest part of a Clubs Day. The event began when he stopped talking, and it began everywhere at once.
'A handful of them had heard the part about asking questions. The rest had heard "the field is open" and started walking.'
