e 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 tha