CHAPTER IV
As Lilly's months went, the one that followed was abloom with events. In her vague, untutored way she was already reaching out, through her daughter, toward a subject about which she knew nothing, but, in an inchoate way, felt a great deal.
The New York State fight for woman's suffrage had not yet reached its victorious culmination, and, reading announcement of a great parade up Fifth Avenue for a Saturday afternoon, she took Zoe.
The smell of spring was dancingly out. Shop windows bloomed with the millinery of May. Open street cars, open skies, and openwork shirt waists had arrived.
They climbed the flank of an omnibus and rode down to the Washington
Arch in a midair snapping with bunting.
It was on one of those irresistible afternoons—radiant with the sun-washed geometry of three architectural renaissances, a monastic-fronted fur emporium, a Parthenon of a library, a Doric-columned bank—that Lilly and Zoe lumbered their omnibus way through the daily carnival of the most rococo avenue in the world.
There was the flare of a sea gull to Zoe—no containing her. Little snatches of song bubbled. She was a freshet of delight.
"Look at that tray of violets, Lilly! I must have a bunch."
"Zoe, don't lean over so far!"
"See the yellow satin in that shop window, Lilly! I'd love to wind it round me. It's like sun!"