As they went away I glared after them. "Damn little muts," I thought. I
was rather in favor of suffrage, at least I felt indulgent about it. Why
shouldn't I be? The great thing was to keep your mind open and kindly,
to feel contempt for nothing whatever. And because I felt contempt for
no thing or person in all the world, I now glared with the most utter
contempt on these narrow-minded little clerks.
Then I hurried out and over to Fifth Avenue, where the throb of the
drums was still to be heard. And there I found to my surprise that in a
very real sense this parade was different from anything that I had ever
seen before. I was more than indulgent, I was excited. And by what? Not
by the marching lines of figures, fluttering banners, booming bands, nor
just by the fact that these marchers were women, and women quite frankly
dressed for effect, so that the whole rhythmic mass had a feminine color
and dash that made it all gay and delightful. No, there was something
deeper. And that something, I finally made out, was this. These women
and girls were all deeply thrilled by the feeling that for the first
time in their lives they were doing something all together--for an idea
that each one of them had thought rather big and stirring before, but
now, as each felt herself a part of this moving, swinging multitude, she
felt the idea suddenly loom so infinitely larger and more compelling
than before that she herself was astounded. Here for the first time in
my life I felt the power of mass action.
And as presently I started home and the intensity of it was gone, there
was an added pleasure to me in remembering how I had felt it. Another
proof of my breadth of mind. I hurried home to dinner.
As I entered our apartment I gave a long, low mysterious whistle. And
after a moment another whistle, which tried hard to be mysterious,
answered mine from another room. Then there were stealthy footsteps
which ended in a sudden charge, and my wee son, "the Indian," hurled me
onto a sofa, where, to use his expression, we "rush-housed" each other.
We did this almost every night.
When the big time was about over Eleanore appeared:
"Come, Indian, it's time for bed." She led him off protesting and blew
me back a kiss from the door.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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