these sun-drenched Saturdays dedicated by a growing tradition
to this or that national expression, the Ninety-ninth Regiment, to a
flare of music that made the heart leap out against its walls, turned
into a scene thus swept clean for it, a wave of olive drab, impeccable
row after impeccable row of scissors-like legs advancing. Recruits, raw
if you will, but already caparisoned, sniffing and scenting, as it were,
for the great primordial mire of war.

There is no state of being so finely sensitized as national
consciousness. A gauntlet down, and it surges up. One ripple of a flag
defended can goose-flesh a nation. How bitter and how sweet it is to
give a soldier!

To the seething kinetic chemistry of such mingling emotions there were
women who stood in the frontal crowds of the sidewalks stifling
hysteria, or ran after in terror at sight of one so personally hers,
receding in that great impersonal wave of olive drab.

And yet the air was martial with banner and with shout. And the ecstasy
of such moments is like a dam against reality, pressing it back. It is
in the pompless watches of the night or of too long days that such dams
break, excoriating.

For the thirty blocks of its course Gertie Slayback followed that wave
of men, half run and half walk. Down from the curb, and at the beck and
call of this or that policeman up again, only to find opportunity for
still another dive out from the invisible roping off of the sidewalk
crowds.

From the middle of his line, she could see, sometimes, the tail of
Jimmie Batch's glance roving for her, but to all purports his eye was
solely for his own replica in front of him, and at such times, when he
marched, his back had a little additional straightness that was almost
swayback.

Nor was Gertie Slayback crying. On the contrary, she was inclined to
laughter. A little too inclined to a high and brittle sort of dissonance
over which she seemed to have no control.

"'By, Jimmie. So long! Jimmie! You-hoo!"

Tramp. Tramp. Tramp-tramp-tramp.

"You-hoo! Jimmie! So long, Jimmie!"

At Fourteenth Street, and to the solemn stroke of one from a tower, she
broke off suddenly without even a second look back, dodging under the
very arms of the crowd as she ran out from it.

She was one and three-quarter minutes late when she punched the
time-clock beside the Complaints and Adjustment Desk in the
Bargain-Basement.

FANNIE HURST

"I find myself at twenty-nine exactly where