On one such day when, standing on the high slope of Fifth Avenue where it rises toward the Park, and looking down on it, surging to and fro, it was as if, so manifest the brilliancy, every head wore a tin helmet, parrying sunlight at a thousand angles of refraction.

Parade-days, all this glittering midstream is swept to the clean sheen of a strip of moire, this splendid desolation blocked on each side by crowds half the density of the sidewalk.

On one of 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.