The dead-infant speaker
And the fact that it was so good to hear her, so good that even Tiny Ewell and Kate Gompert and the rest of the worst of them all sat still and listened without blinking, looking not just at the speaker’s face but into it, helps force Gately to remember all over again what a tragic adventure this is, that none of them signed up for.
Context
The scene's close: the hall's ultimate compliment of unblinking reception, with Kate named among "the worst of them" — the suicidal depressive, whose own testimony no meeting could reach, pierced for a moment by somebody else's bottom. The only motion Kate's affect shows all night.