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YOU WILL REMEMBER IT!
Say, that was something that nobody had seen and therefore everybody could joke about. Every woman had the same remark and the same grin: "Haven't I seen my husband?"
Before the parade had gone half a square Fifth Avenue was blocked. Apart from the interference of the band and the sandwiches with vehicular traffic, there was the paralysis of the pedestrians. The Peacock Parade halted. Slim figures, half-naked, flat-bosomed, stalked swayingly to the curb and stared with eyes in which was the insolent sex challenge that New York males answer with furs and jewels. And as they looked the challenge of sex died in the eyes of the women: the marchers had no sex; anybody could see they had no money!
And the men, too, ceased to look stallion-eyed at the women and gazed on the parade of sandwich-men, who, in the middle of the street, with the machines and the horses, slouched on—almost rubbing valuable varnish on automobiles and carriages, careless beasts!
Presently the hurrying crowds slowed their gait and kept step to Chopin's dirge—slowly! slowly!—until all Fifth Avenue was a vast funeral procession; only the marchers could not have told you what it was that long since had died of gold on Fifth Avenue! Slowly! Slowly! And with the funereal gait other changes came—in the grimace of the over-red lips and the look of the over-bold eyes. But never the slightest change in the color of the cheeks, which was there to stay, in rain, shine, or snow.
"What is it? What is it?" whispered ten thousand people.
From the middle of the street it sounded like the whimper of ten thousand little foamy waves dying on a flat beach. It made the filthy bipeds who marched look at the thronged sidewalks.
They saw the usual Fifth Avenue crowd. They saw the full-fed, clock-hating faces of professional idlers; the drawn features of the busy money-maker with his perennial anxieties; the suddenly immobilized grimaces of millionaires intended to conceal the fear of God knew what; the contemptuous countenances of waiters from fashionable restaurants, who, like ordained priests, knew America at its worst, but, unlike priests, could not pity; healthy American boys with clean faces and the eyes of animals.