t 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 u