We had been married four years.

At the end of a crisp November day I was just about starting home. I remember how keenly alive I felt, how tingling with bodily health, and above all how successful.

I had had such a successful day. I had written hard all morning and my work had been going splendidly. I had lunched downtown with the man whose life I was writing that month, a man of astounding fertility, who had started fifteen years ago with a small hotel in a western town, had made money, had built a larger hotel, had made money, had moved to a larger town and bought a still larger hotel, had made money, had moved to Chicago, New York, had made money. And the America he knew was made up of people who themselves had made their money so suddenly they had to come to hotels to spend it. The stories that he told me, both scandalous and otherwise, of these men and women who shot up rich and diamondy out of this booming country of ours, had a range and a richness of color that had held me delighted through many long talks. During luncheon he had told some of his best, and had given me permission to print, with a discreet twist or so to disguise them, certain intimate episodes in the first fat years of men whose names were by-words now all over the land. I could already see that story selling on the newsstands.

From this man I had come uptown to a branch of the Y. M. C. A., where after an hour of hand-ball and a plunge in the swimming tank I had gone to a room downstairs, to which ambitious youngsters came for free advice from an expert who told them how to get on in life. His room was a confessional. He would cross-examine each suppliant hard, make a diagnosis of each one and then give him advice as to what to do—whether or not to throw over his job, what kind of work he was suited for best. The America he knew was made up of these small human units, some pitiably or absurdly small, but all anxiously straining upward. And they too appealed to me.

For I was so successful now that I was growing mellow. From certain big men I had written about I had taken a spacious breadth of view that included a deep indulgence for all these skurrying pigmies. Poor little devils, give 'em a chance, especially those among them who had "bim" enough to want a chance, to wonder why they were not getting on and want to do something about it. And so I had formed the habit of dropping in often at this room, hearing its confessions and now and then helping get someone a job. As the swimming tank made my body tingle, so this place affected my soul. It warmed me to do all I could for some fellow, some decent kid who was down on his luck. Besides, some confessions were gems of their kind, glimpses into human lives, hard struggles, wild ambitions. I meant to write them up some day. In fact, I meant to write everything up, I felt everything waiting for my pen.

And as I went down to the coat-room, the thought I had had so often lately came again into my mind. I too would soon throw over my job, leave articles and write fiction—my old Paris dream. But what a wide and varied experience of life I had gathered since those ingenuous Paris days. Yes, I would do it real and big, out of the big life I had known. And my heroes would no longer be watching at my elbow to point to the choicest bits and say, "You're mistaken, young man, I never said that." No, all those lifelike human touches would stay in. Stories kept coming up in my mind, one especially of late. As I stood in line for my hat and coat I thought of it now and grew so absorbed I forgot that I was standing in a line of insignificant clerks—until the one ahead of me, who had just come in from the street, asked the chap in front of him:

"Say, Gus, did you see the suffragettes? Their parade's just going by."

This brought me down from the clouds with a jerk. For I had meant to see that parade. Sue was in it, in it hard. Suffrage was her latest fad.

"Naw," growled Gus. "If I was the mayor and they came to me for a permit to march I'd tell 'em to go and buy corsets. That's their complaint. They can't get kissed so they want to vote." The other one chuckled:

"I saw one who can have my vote—and all I'll ask is a better look. Believe me, some silk stockings!"

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.

She had developed wonderfully, this bewitching wife of mine, this quiet able one in her work, this smiling humorous one in her life, this watchful, joyous, intimate one in the hours that shut everything out. Sue said I idolized my wife, that I saw her all perfection, "without one redeeming vice." Not at all. I knew her vices well enough. I knew she could get distinctly cross when a new gown came home all wrong. I knew that she could lie to me, I had caught her at it several times when she said she was feeling finely and then confessed to me the next day, "I had a splitting headache last night." In fact, she had any number of vices—queer, mysterious feminine moods when she quite shamelessly shut me out. She didn't half take care of herself, she went places when she should have stayed at home. And finally, she was slow at dressing. Placidly seated in front of her mirror she could spend an entire hour in doing her soft luxuriant hair.

I went over all these vices now as I lay back on the sofa. Idolize her? Not at all. I knew her. We were married, thank God.

Then she came back into the room. She was smiling in rather a curious way, an expectant way, and I noticed that her color was unusually high. Eleanore always dressed so well, but to-night she had outdone herself. From her trim blue satin slippers to the demure little band of blue at her throat she was more enchantingly fresh than ever. Suffragettes and that sort of thing were all very well on the Avenue. Give me Eleanore at home.

"Did you see the parade?" she inquired.

"Yes."

"Did you see me?"

I fairly jumped!

"You?" I demanded. "Were you in that march?"

"I most certainly was," she said quietly. Having shot her bolt she was regarding me gravely now, with the merest glint of amused delight somewhere in her gray-blue eyes. "Why not?" she asked. "I believe in it, I want the vote. Why shouldn't I march? I paraded," she added serenely, "in the college section right up near the head of the line. That's why I'm home so early. I'm afraid I was quite conspicuous, for you see I'm rather small and I had to take long swinging strides to keep in step. But I soon got used to it, and I thoroughly enjoyed the cheers. We waved back at them with our flags."

"But," I cried, "my darling wife! Why didn't you tell me about it ahead?"

"Because"—she came close up to me and said quite confidentially, "we do these things all by ourselves. You don't mean to say that you mind it, dear?"

I lost about five seconds and then I did exactly right. I took her in my arms and laughed and called my wife by many names and said she couldn't worry me, that I didn't mind it in the least, was proud of her and so on. In short, to use a slang expression, I distinctly got away with it. Moreover, I soon felt what I said. I was honestly rather proud of my wife for having had the nerve to march. It must have been quite a struggle, for she was no born marcher.

And I was glad that I was proud. Another proof of my tolerance—which was the more grateful to me just now because a magazine man I admired had genially hinted the other day that I was rather narrow.

"Did you see Sue?" I inquired.

"Only for a moment," she said. "Sue was one of the marshals and she was all up and down the lines. She's coming to supper with many paraders."

"A crowd of women here? I'm off!"

"No you're not. She's bringing some men paraders too."

Men paraders! Now I could smile. I had earned the right, I had been broad. But after all, there are limits. I could see those chaps parading with women. I knew them, I had seen them before, for Sue had often brought them here. I enjoyed myself immensely—till Eleanore shot another bolt.

"Smile on, funny one," she said. "You'll be in line yourself in a year."

"I will not be in line!"

"I wonder." She looked at me in a curious way. The mirth went slowly out of her eyes. "There are so many queer new ideas crowding in all around us," she said. "And I know you, Billy, oh, so well—so much better than you know yourself. I know that when you once feel a thing you're just the kind to go into it hard. I'm not speaking of suffrage now—that's only one nice little part. I mean this whole big radical movement—all the kind of thing your friend Joe Kramer stood for." She put her arms about my neck. "Don't get too radical, husband mine—you're so nice and funny now, my love."

I regarded her anxiously:

"Has this parade gone to your head—or has Sue been talking to you again?"

"I lunched with Sue——"

"I knew it! And now she's coming here to supper—bringing men paraders!"

"And they'll all be rabidly hungry," said Eleanore with a sudden change. She went quickly in to see the cook and left me to grim meditation.

I a radical? I smiled. And my slight uneasiness passed away, as I thought about my sister.