Secrets on 26th Street by Elizabeth McDavid Jones Page B

careful not to stomp on her way back to her room. No use giving Mum more reason to be mad at her. No, Mum would be angry enough when she found out Susan had gone off and left Lucy with Russell’s mother for the day.
    Because nothing was going to stop Susan from going to that suffrage rally tomorrow. Nothing.
    Mum and Bea were both gone when the girls got up Saturday morning. There was a note to Susan on the kitchen table. It was from Mum, apologizing for snapping at her and marked with two long lines of X s—Mum’s kisses. The note made Susan feel guilty about disobeying Mum to go to the rally, but not guilty enough to change her mind.
    Now Susan, Russell, and Helen were on their way, the trolley lurching and bumping along Fifth Avenue. The suffrage parade was to begin at one o’clock, and the rally would follow in Central Park. Russell and Helen seemed to be enjoying the ride, despite its bumpiness. Susan tried to lean back and relax as well, but she was too excited, and there was too much to see. Though she had lived in the city all her life, she had never been this far uptown.
    Uptown was a different world from Chelsea. Instead of run-down brick tenements, uptown streets were lined with quiet, dignified brownstones behind wrought-iron fences and with elegant stores and apartment buildings where uniformed doormen waited. Pierce-Arrows and Packards were parked on the curbs, not the milk-wagon nags and Model T’s seen on Chelsea’s curbs. There were fancy restaurants and office buildings with ornate facades and arched windows.
    Even the uptown people were different. No one hurried here. Pedestrians sauntered along the street, lolling in front of houses or store windows. Men in suits with narrow trousers strolled arm in arm with women in feathered hats and fur-trimmed jackets. Mothers pushed infants in prams along the sidewalk.
    As the trolley crossed 50th Street, Susan’s heart beat faster. Cars draped with yellow banners were already in line for the parade. The line must have stretched the entire nine blocks up to Central Park.
    Once off the trolley, Susan, Russell, and Helen hurried to find a spot on the sidewalk amid the crowd that was already gathering to watch the parade. Mounted policemen patrolled the avenue trying to keep the crowd in order. By the time the parade began, a solid wall of spectators hung behind the ropes stretched across the sidewalk. Susan wondered whether they all supported suffrage or were only here to gawk at “the dangerous home wreckers” that the Times had reported would be marching.
    Soon the bands struck up and the marchers came, hundreds of women in yellow sashes, striding confidently through the sea of spectators, their yellow banners floating in the wind. Susan thought it was a thrilling sight.
    And the men were marching, too, just as the newspaper said they would. There were countless bands and floats, an endless procession of automobiles, drums beating, trumpets tooting, horns honking. Susan’s pulse quickened with every beat of the drums.
    Susan tried to look at every face, all the marchers, as they went by, to see if she could figure out what it was about them that made people so angry. But there were too many marchers to see them all, and they went by too fast. Besides, they looked so ordinary. They looked like all the other men and women Susan knew, and the people she saw on the streets of the city every day.
    Later, at the rally, Susan felt her heart thrill again when Alice Paul began to speak. The rest of the crowd melted away for Susan. All she saw was the platform where Alice Paul stood; all she heard were the words Alice Paul spoke in her strong, vibrant voice.
    â€œOur movement isn’t just about the rights of women,” Miss Paul said. “It’s about the rights of individuals—all of us here—to participate in the freedoms of our country, a country founded on the principles of fairness and justice, but a country which