"I think it is."
"You darling!"
They alighted at the Washington Arch, jamming their way into the tight battalion of spectators already lining both sides of lower Fifth Avenue. The head of the parade was already forming, a slim young leader holding in her white mount with difficulty.
"Lilly, she looks like our picture of Jeanne d'Arc when she sees the vision!"
"She is heeding a vision, Zoe—of to-morrow."
"I feel so—so thrilled, Lilly. Do you?"
"Yes," said Lilly, for some reason breathing hard. "Oh, I do!"
There was a break of music, and all about them women darting into line, sudden banners floating out, and the white horse prancing in the archway, for all the world as if spun at a tangent off the narrative frieze of the arch.
At the Eighth Street curb, where they stood, five hundred women, with standards lifted, stiffened suddenly into formation, a deputy from their ranks, a buyer, by the way, for the largest cloak-and-suit house in the world, calling short, quick orders and distributing American flags.
The air was rent with silk and brass; a simoom of rapture raced over Zoe. She danced on the balls of her feet. It was then that a deputy, with a face that recalled newspaper reproductions of it, spied her.