Title:      The Prodigal Parents (1938)
Author:     Sinclair Lewis
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.:  0301071h.html
Language:   English
Date first posted:          August 2003
Date most recently updated: August 2003

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In the darkness of the country road after midnight the car was speeding, but the three young men jammed together in the one seat did not worry. They were exhilarated by the violence of the speeches they had heard at the strikers' mass meeting in the factory town of Cathay. When the car skidded slightly on a turn and the left-hand wheels crunched on the gravelled shoulder, the driver yelped, 'Hey, whoa-up!' But she did not whoa-up.

They were not drunk, except with high spirits. They had had a few bottles of beer, but what intoxicated them was the drama of thick-necked, bright-eyed strike leaders denouncing the tyranny of the bosses, the press, the taxpayers and all other oppressors. Two of the young men were juniors in Truxon College, and as they considered themselves to have been frequently and ludicrously misjudged by their own bosses, their parents and professors, they would (they told themselves) have stayed on in Cathay, joined the picket line, brave with bricks and pick handles, and probably have been gloriously killed, had it not been for a critically important fraternity dance at Truxon next evening.

As a substitute for thus entering the martyrs' profession, they now howled a song which stated that Labour was a Mighty Giant which was going to smash all its foemen immediately.

The third young man did not sing with them. He was a radical agitator; his name was Eugene Silga; he was slim and taut, with skin the colour of a cigar; and he had had quite enough singing in Cathay County Jail, a month ago. When the students stopped for breath, he protested, in the easy voice of a professional speaker, 'You seem to think it's going to be a cinch to overthrow the exploiting capitalist class--your own class, remember, you cursed sons of aristocrats. It's not! It'll take a lot more than singing to make Wall Street apologize to the Proletariat and go crawl in a hole.'

'Hurray! Wall Street in a hole! Lez go dig the hole!' bawled the driver.

This driver was a tall, wide young man, with wavy hair of red gold, a Norse god with eyes like the Baltic Sea in summer, and a face handsome as a magazine cover and stupid as a domesticated carp. His name was Howard Cornplow, and he was an adept in football, in golf, and in finding reasons why, at any particular recitation hour, he knew nothing whatever about the epistemology of Plato's Meno. He did know a great deal about the crawl stroke, however, which may have been just as well.

Howard Cornplow was a hearty young man, and he loved to argue. Accelerating a little, occasionally looking away from the road toward the agitator Silga, who sat in the dimness over beside the right-hand door, he shouted, 'Oh, rats, Gene! Don't you think if all us educated guys gang up on our folks, they'll snap out of their fool ex-up-expropriating attitude?'

'I do not!'

'Now look here. You take my dad. Old Fred. I can argue him down till he skips out and slams the door.'

As Howard continued, it was revealed that this 'dad', motor dealer in the city of Sachem Falls, N.Y., was an acceptable fellow, and that he was chronically overcome by his son's eloquence. Just to clarify it, Howard gave samples of the eloquence, and during the spirited recital he forgot that he was driving an automobile, and at sixty-five miles an hour.

The other student, Guy Staybridge, scrawny, big-nosed, spectacled, eager, wailed, 'Hey, watch what you're doing, will you, young Cornplow?'

'Don't you worry. I'm a careful driver,' clucked the Norse god, as he happily developed his theme that, in order to be converted to loving communism, the stuffy, prosperous, middle-class merchants like Fred Cornplow needed nothing more than friendly tips from such up-to-date examples of the Youth Movement as Howard Cornplow, Eugene Silga, and Guy Staybridge, with a few explanations about how the economic system really worked.

The car swayed on an abrupt turning. Howard kept it snugly to the right. But this was an S-curve, and as Howard looked away from the road towards Eugene, accelerating a little in his triumphant high spirits, the car, in a hundredth of a second, in a madness of speed that had nothing to do with time by the watch, bolted across the ditch, bounded on turf, twisted--crushing the three young men closer together--half swung around, grazed a birch tree, smashed a fender and a headlight and half the hood, and came up short, while the huddle of three were jerked sidewise, then hurled toward the windshield.

Instantly, an incredible silence of night. The car's lights were gone. Stillness and darkness clothed them in unreality. Nothing had happened. They were dead, worried Eugene Silga, as slowly he came to believe that he was not dead.

He was on his hands and knees on the wet turf of early winter; his cheek seemed to be bleeding, and his left shoulder stung; he could feel that his sleeves had been slashed to rags. But Gene Silga had been through riots, through club and paving-stone battles between strikers and policemen; he had been beaten by deputies; he was a veteran; and for all the reeking ache of his shoulder, he was not hysterical as he decided that the right-hand door must have burst open and himself been hurled out. He crawled to his feet, more conscious of the cold grass than of his pain, and sloped toward the car. No sound save hoarse breathing in this obscene silence.

He lit a cigar lighter--it was a trinket of gold--foppish and expensive for an agitator like Gene Silga; and the wife of a cement manufacturer had given it to him when he was abetting a strike against her husband. He saw that Howard Cornplow and Guy Staybridge were bleeding from cut foreheads, both of them unconscious, both alive.

He felt them over. He quietly set the flaming cigar lighter in a crevice of the crumpled dashboard, and with his handkerchief and others from the boys' pockets, bound their heads. He tugged Howard out of the car and laid him on the earth, his own coat under the Norse god's head. He propped up Guy in the seat. He stepped down from the running board, wincing as, to his sick fancy, his shoulder seemed to howl with pain. He staggered into the road and looked methodically back and ahead.

He made out a tiny light back along the road and went swaying toward it, his thin hand pressed tight to his shoulder. As he plodded, he hummed the 'Internationale', though it was punctuated with small groans.

The source of the light was a farmhouse, a bulk of darkness--and instantly there was a hateful dog pattering toward him, snarling. Gene kicked to right and left, felt a stone with his toe, stooped, cringing with pain, to pick up the stone, and marched on to meet the coming dog . . . For more than a year, once, Gene had been a hobo and learned the harsh wisdom of outfacing dangers: deppities and railroad dicks and their relatives, the savage dogs. He gushed, in the tone of a spinster lady addressing her Pekinese: 'Why Towser I'm tho ashamed of you! Don't oo remember oo's old friend Gene, oo sweet dirty son of a so and so, darling?'

The dog was puzzled. In a truce, but a truce still armed, it sniffed at Gene and followed him to the farmhouse door, from which an old man was peering.

Gene droned, 'Motor accident--smash-up--got a telephone I can use?'

'Guess so. Thought I heard a crash. Come in, boy.'

Gene telephoned on to Truxon village, site of the college, for an ambulance, a doctor. When he turned, the farmer called from an adjoining room, 'Be right with you, soon 's I dress.'

'Thanks, sir. I'll go ahead.'

'Want a flashlight?'

The question seemed to stir in Gene Silga some startling thought, and he sounded doubtful as he muttered, 'Oh. Oh, sure, you bet. Thanks.'

He was too reflective, as he trembled out of the house, to pay much heed to the still grumbling dog; he absently patted its head, while its tail wagged as finally it recognized a fellow killer.

On his way to the car, Gene thought angrily: 'Well, why not? Why shouldn't I? These snobs like Howard--oh, they'll buy you a dinner, yes, with beer and highballs, if they've recently gouged any money out of their slave-drivers of dads. That's so they can show off how liberal and brave they are. But do they care a hoot whether an organizer has one cent for breakfast--whether you sleep in a lousy lodging house--whether you have to hitch-hike to the next town? They do not! They've got to be made to care, and to pay. It's not for me personally. It's for the Revolution . . . Stealing? . . . Nothing but a word. One of my last holdovers from bourgeois morals . . . Didn't Stalin himself,' and mentally, Gene crossed himself, 'didn't he rob banks, as a youngster, to get money for the Cause? . . . Of course I'll do it.'

He had reached the wrecked car.

He ran the glow of the flashlight over Howard and Guy Staybridge. They were still out. With fingers sensitive as those of a miniature painter, or even a pickpocket, he searched them. From inside Howard's coat he took a billfold which contained three ten-dollar bills, six ones and a five. He removed one ten and three ones; with precise care he folded them small and tucked them into his shoe; and more delicately than ever he slid the billfold back into the pocket where (but only according to outmoded bourgeois ethics, of course) it belonged.

He examined Howard's bandage, straightened it a little, and sat on the running board till the farmer and the ambulance should come. He had already forgotten the pleasant addition to his war chest. He was thinking of the editorial on the flimsiness of college courses in economics which he was going to write as soon as he succeeded in founding a communist magazine.

The farmer loomed up, grunted, looked, exhibited the proper pleasure at seeing a real accident so near his hearthstone, made sure that he got his flashlight back from Gene and went away after, surprisingly, asking no questions beyond: Who were these three young men? Their occupations? Their parentage? Dates of birth? Place of birth? Their opinions of Franklin D. Roosevelt? And where had they been going, and why were they going so fast, considering that the farmer himself never drove over 30 m.p.h.--though, course, it was true that he didn't have no car like this Triumph Special, a dandy job that Special was, and how many m.p.h. did Gene, upon reasoned opinion, think a Triumph could do?

The coming ambulance smashed the grateful peace after the farmer had gone his ways, provided with new breakfast conversation.

The doctor in the Truxon ambulance found that there was among the three young men no mortal injury: Howard Cornplow had a superficial frontal cut and two ribs cracked against the steering wheel; Guy Staybridge, a fractured arm and a contusion probably not serious; Gene Silga, a broken shoulder-blade.

'Of course you young college geniuses . . .' began the interne, on the front seat with Gene and the driver.

'I'm no young college genius. I got kicked out of City College of New York six years ago, when I was twenty, for insubordination: to wit, telling a prof that he was a fat-headed grafter and beating up a tin soldier who tried to stop a pacifist parade,' said Gene, in the gentlest of purrs.

'Well anyway, you young hell-raisers think you've got more zip than four thousand pounds of steel and petrol. Anybody that ever drives over forty miles an hour is a fool,' said the interne--as the ambulance accelerated to fifty. Fretfully he added, to the driver, 'Step on it, can't you? I got to get back to my poker game. I need a little sleep, but, as I was telling you, what could I do when I had a full house, and Doc Brady lays for me, and seems he has four kinks, cold, and so I kep' raising him and he raised back . . . What's the matter with this bus, anyway? Crawls along like a steam-roller.'

To Frederick William Cornplow, this day was as another. The round little man, district agent for Triumph and Houndtooth automobiles in the Sachem Falls territory, had finished his cornflakes and bacon and poached eggs, in the scarlet-and-canary-yellow breakfast porch, which was not a porch, when he was called to the telephone and learned that his son, Howard, was in the hospital with injuries from a motor accident.

'I'll be there right away,' answered Fred Cornplow evenly.

He told neither his good wife, Hazel, nor his daughter, Sara, of the accident. For Hazel, who always drifted down to breakfast late, a soft and smiling sleepyhead, he left a note, 'Had to hustle office to see a man. F.'

The distance from his brick Colonial house, on the corner of Fenimore Cooper Boulevard and Tuke Street, Sachem Falls, N.Y., to the William Jackson Belch Infirmary, Truxon College, was seventy and a half miles, with a good deal of factory trucking traffic. He drove it in two hours flat. He got up to seventy on stretches, but through villages he dropped to twenty-five. He was a veteran driver and rigidly careful. He decidedly did not sing about Labour being a giant or anything else. He did not think much of Labour anyway. He employed it.

Through the drive, never taking his eyes from the road, he alternately decided that Howard could not be badly hurt, therefore Howard was a young fool and ought to have his car taken away from him, and that Howard was nigh unto death, in which case he was a superb driver whose accident was due to some double-damned garage mechanic's carelessness with steering gear or brakes . . . and that, in either case, the Norse god, with his kinky copper hair and his easy smile, was his father's heart and soul and means of immortality.

Fred jumped out at the Truxon infirmary, just back of the white and pillared official residence of the college president, and ran up the steps, but to the reception girl he said with gravity, 'My name is Cornplow. I believe my son was injured in a smash.'

'Oh yes. He's not badly hurt. The doctor isn't here, but I think you can go in and see Mr. Cornplow--he's in Room E, with some other stoodents.'

As Fred clumped up the linoleum-shining stairs, he reflected that it was startling to hear Howard called 'Mr. Cornplow'. He, Fredk Wm, was Mr. Cornplow. Howard--heck!--he was Howard!

He peeped into Room E, where, sunk on their pillows or sitting on the edges of their beds, were six young men, all bandaged, all pale, and all--in Fred's opinion--crazy as ticks, for they were screaming their opinions (or the opinions of whichever newspaper they happened to read) of Russia, Roosevelt, Manchuria, backgammon, biochemistry, and the ham and cabbage at the college dining hall.

Howard was on his back. As Fred walked between the rows of beds, shy in the presence of these gilded young strangers, irritated that he had been so yearningly sentimental all the way from Sachem, Howard saw him and bellowed, 'Hello, Dad! Swell of you to come. I'm O.K. Couple of ribs K.O.'d. They don't hurt much, but gosh almighty, the doc insisted on putting a big, thick adhesive-tape bandage on me, it's like a double-strength corset, and wow, does it itch, ask me, does it, and the bandage so thick you can't scratch through it, and say, I figure there's a whole war manoeuvres going on underneath it--there's six regiments of fleas and a troop of light-mounted lice and . . .'

Fred sat on a chair by the bed and he, the round, the cheery, the jesting salesman, was solemn, feeling that the other crocks were inspecting this phenomenon, a Visiting Father. He interrupted:

'How'd it happen?'

'Happen? Nobody could've avoided it. Car jumped the road and hit a tree. And I was cold sober, and tending strictly to business . . .'

'How fast?'

'Fast? You mean how fast was I going?'

'I do.'

'Oh, I dunno--not more 'n forty . . .'

'Or maybe sixty?'

'Well, you know--just a fair cruising speed. There was an S-curve there--absolutely a disgrace--entirely the fault of the county authorities--simply a crime--and when I get out of this, I'm going to sue the county. Oh say, Dad, you know Guy Staybridge, from Sachem, don't you--old hawkface, there in the next bed?'

Fred bowed. Guy waggled a melancholy fingertip. 'Oh, yes--the son of Putnam Staybridge?' Fred murmured.

'I--I understand so,' said Guy.

Fred was almost reverent. Like most Americans, he was perfectly democratic, except, perhaps, as regards social standing, wealth, political power, and club membership; but was not Mr. Putnam Staybridge believed to be a descendant of the Mayflower? Was he not the chief aristocrat of Sachem Falls?

Howard was volleying on: 'Yessir, absolutely county supervisors' fault, and they ought to be shown up. Just like all governments, except in Russia--oppress the people and kill 'em by tyranny and darn careless sloppiness. Dad, did you realize that in the past year--and the Americans thinking they're so efficient--the growth in production in heavy industry in the Ural section of Russia has been two hundred and seventeen per cent?'

'So? What is this "heavy industry"?'

'Heavy industry? Oh, you know. Darn it, I guess Gene Silga--say, now I think of it, I wonder where they took Gene when they brought us here, Guy?--but anyway, I don't believe Gene said anything about what heavy industry does cover. It's machines and so on, isn't it? What d'you think, Dad?'

Fred Cornplow, in the manner of a Roman candle on Fourth of July evening, suddenly flowered and flamed in parental rage. But he spoke so softly that not even Guy, in the next bed, could overhear.

'Think? Think? I think you're a conceited, inconsiderate young pup! I think you're so self-centred and so doggone satisfied with yourself that it never occurs to you to remember how you might scare your mother and Sara and me, or how you hurt our feelings! I think it would be a bright idea to keep your scholarship marks from dropping about two hundred and seventeen per cent per each and every doggone annum, instead of going around feeling good because you've personally whooped up Soviet production so doggone much. And finally, I suppose you'll expect me to pay for having your car fixed after you've deliberately been and gone and driven so carelessly that I know doggone well you weren't keeping your eyes on the road and you ran off it! And of course, pass the buck to the county--and to me, to get it fixed!'

Howard's blue eyes of a young Balder, Norse godling of the summer radiance, looked hurt.

'But gee, Dad, it won't cost so much, will it, if you have it done in your own repair shop, at the agency?'

Fred was glaring now, and Howard begged, 'Gosh, honest, I wasn't driving fast, Dad. I don't think I was. I'm awfully sorry.'

'Grrrrr!' said Fredk Wm. For this was the third calamitous accident Howard had achieved in two years, and each time Fred had determined that it was his duty, finally, to say 'Grrrrr!'

'It might have been something I ate. That's what it was. Prob'ly something I ate,' said Fred. 'Or maybe it was the snow glare. Made me dizzy. Or prob'ly that cold I had last week. But chances are,' and he spoke with solidity and conviction, 'it was something I ate.'

He crawled from under the mountain range of bedclothes, he rubbed his forehead, he scratched his ruddy moustache, which resembled half a doughnut, he flapped his tongue in an interested and speculative manner, he took a romantic position, eyes closed and forefinger to temple, as befitted one who was importantly ill, and he croaked, 'I'll bet it was the pie.'

'If you know just what you're talking about, dear, I'd be glad of a tip on the subject,' sighed his wife, from the other twin bed in their pink and creamy chamber.

'If I--if I know--what I'm talking about!' He was moved to light a cigarette, though normally he was not one to sit in his nightshirt, upon the edges of beds, after midnight, and toy with cigarettes. 'Of course--of course. Man dying of pneumonia or malaria or something--just dying, that's all--and all his family is interested in is: "Does he know what he's talking about?"'

'Dear, I just meant. . . What is it, really?'

'I've got a fever.'

'You? A fever?'

'Yes, me. Not Sara, nor Howard, nor the cat, nor the maid's second cousin's brother-in-law, but me! F-e-v-e-r!'

Hazel Cornplow, plump little wife of the plump little man, climbed out of the misty layers of sleep in which she had been nestling, out of the downy strata of the very best poplin and blankets and foamy pink comforter, appropriate to this February night, drowsily wrapped herself in something that was a cross between, a feather boa and a Persian rug ($31.98 at Swazey & Lindbeck's, this past Christmas), and laid her plump, kind hand on his forehead.

'My! It does seem hot!' she exulted, with the pleasure all right-thinking persons feel in discovering that the best-beloved is helpless and that we shall be allowed to manage him.

'Something I ate. Lunch at the Elks' Club,' he croaked, ignorant of how fondly, in what he believed to be a grand and impressive tantrum, he was looking at her.

'What did you have?'

'Well--you know--just an ordinary lunch--I was lunching with Walter Lindbeck and Doc Kamerkink--we were talking about coddling the unemployed. I said to the doc, "Where's this business going to end, that's what I want to know;" and Walter says . . .'

'But what did you eat, dear?'

'Oh. Eat? Well, zy remember it, I had some corn soup, and I wish to thunder you'd try to coax that hired girl to make it for me oftener, no better soup made than a good corn soup with corn in it, and I had couple pork chops and some pickled beets and pickled watermelon rind and some cucumbers and some pie a la mode--raisin pie it was, with orange ice on it. . .'

Over Hazel's face--after slumber she looked not her fifty-three, but a fresh thirty--quivered a grin.

Fred held up his hand like a traffic policeman and protested:

'No! Wait! I know! I guess maybe it wasn't an entirely sensible lunch. But still, I don't rate this awful fever just from mixing up my grub a little. Are you going to sit there and gabble while I'm practically dying, you might say?'

'Oh, I know, Fred. Listen. Sara's got a clinical thermometer up in her room--she used it for something or other when she was doing charity work in New York. It'll tell if you really feel bad.'

'I don't need any clinical thermometer to tell me how I feel! I just listen to the voice of my inner conscience, and it tells me I feel like the wrath of God!'

'I'm not,' she said, with that power of ignoring chatter which a professional wife develops after thirty years, 'I'm not sure I can read the thermometer right. Isn't it funny how we brought up two children without thermometers or bran or psychology or any of those new inventions! But I'll try it.'

She paddled into the wide hall with its landscape wallpaper. She did not seem oppressively worried. When she returned with the thermometer, which she held as though it were composed of dynamite, she spoke not of woe and mortalities, but gossiped, 'Almost one o'clock, and Sara not in yet.'

'Where the dickens that young woman goes . . . These modern girls. Sit around. Drink gin and try to talk politics! Discuss Conditions and Situations. Never get any sleep. They'll never have our pep at our age. When I was twenty-eight, like Sara . . . Brugluph!'

Hazel, with the rapture of an amateur nurse, had taken advantage of him by jamming the thermometer under his tongue. He sat slowly wobbling it with his lips, trying to continue his look of brave suffering, though by now he had almost forgotten from what he suffered. The sight of the black-rubber thermometer case in Hazel's hand recalled to him a new grievance, and as soon as she had slid the glass tube out of his mouth, he exploded:

'And another thing! You been using my fountain pen again! Oh, I can tell! The cap was on loose.'

She did not listen to this entirely justified charge. Like any other sound wife, she intended to go right on using his pen, as well as his razor and even his portable typewriter.

Studying the thermometer, she worried:

'Fred! Darling! You have got a fever!'

'Whadie tell you!'

'But it seems quite bad. If I make this thing out correctly, your temperature is a hundred and twenty degrees!'

'You're crazy! Gimme that thing! Hundred and twenty! If I had that, I'd be dead. I'll show you.'

He sucked the thermometer again, removed it, glanced at it with the careless mastery of a veteran salesman, and howled, 'Good heavens, girl, I have got a temperature of a hundred and twenty! I'm dead as a doornail!'

Side by side, hands clinging, they sat worrying.

His lament had covered a sound of footsteps in the hall, and neither of them was conscious of their daughter till she stood in the door, demanding, like an inspector out raiding, 'Why the wailing, Dad? What may all the trouble be?'

Pitifully, like a child showing a broken toy, Fred held up the thermometer, protesting, 'I've got a temperature of a hundred and twenty!'

'Oh, stuff!' Sara was, at twenty-eight, a perfect Queen Elizabeth. (Her name had been Sarah until, as a junior in high school, she had decapitated it.) 'You can't even read a thermometer. A fine lot of good you'd be if you were over in China now, fighting. Couldn't even care for the wounded. As untrained as Howard.'

'I don't intend to be over in China now, fighting, nor any other time, neither. The home talent there takes plenty care of that.'

'Huh! Here, open your mouth, Dad.'

She stood regally tall, silver cape about her seal-brown evening frock, while Fred, not the meekest of little men, had his temperature taken for the third time within ten minutes.

The lady Storm Trooper firmly removed the thermometer, and crowed, 'You haven't even half a degree of temperature. What you need is more sleep--at your age. G' night.'

She was gone, trailing behind her that magnificent intolerance.

Hazel looked at Fred, just looked, understandingly, and he trembled into speech:

'"At your age". And me only fifty-five! I ask you, is fifty-five any "your age"? It is not! And here I'd intended to find out what she means, staying out till all hours. That's where I lost out--when I first gave her a latchkey without a struggle.

'And . . . I suppose a fellow always loves his own daughter, don't he?' Fred pondered.

'Why, of course!'

'You do read in these novels and stories and everything where sons and daughters don't always love their parents, though, don't you?'

'Yes, I . . . I guess maybe you do.'

'Think their folks are just cranks and stuffed shirts?'

'Yes, but--oh, she's young, Fred.'

'Her? I'd been married three years, at her age.'

'Sara is so clever and educated and all. And she does look exactly like Diana. So tall and elegant. . .'

'Diana who?'

'The goddess--you know--in that green book.'

And, indeed, Hazel did not exaggerate. The supple, grey-eyed, neat-nosed, swift-moving Miss Sara Cornplow did look exactly like Diana--not that anybody knows how Diana looked.

'That don't excuse her for being so superior,' complained Fred. 'It beats the dickens how smart she is at making a fellow feel guilty all the time about things that aren't any of his business. Conditions and Situations! Inhibitions and Hormones! Russia! Share croppers! Miners' wages! Rats!'

Always Fred would mix the literacy of his college days with the colloquialisms of repair shop and junction lunchroom, till a foreigner would be puzzled as to whether he might be a scholar or a comedian.

'Doggone it, I don't own any mines! I'm not underpaying any miners! I don't have to feel guilty! I've always treated my family O.K., haven't I?'

'Of course.'

'Ain't a man in the motor game that can say Fred Cornplow ever done them, not even in the second-hand business. Why, say, I don't suppose I've pepped up some old plug with ether, not more'n half a dozen times in my life. But Sara--say, she even says, just because I like a good healthy nightshirt better 'n I do pyjamas, that I belong to the horse-and-buggy era--me that invented an oil filter that almost got taken up by Ford--and prob'ly she thinks you're a secret tobacco-chewer.

'And now that Howard seems to have gone and become a Red, guess it's from some brain injury he got in that last accident, him and Sara will gang up on me. I could always count on their bucking each other. When she come out of Vassar and first got noble and humanitarian on me, and had that six-months' charity job in New York, Howard was all for athletics; and when she managed to hitch up socialism and high sassiety, me having about an equal grouch on both of 'em, Howard decided he was a hairy pioneer and liked camping. But if they work together, what a run they'll give us.

'Still, maybe I am hard on Sara. She don't know yet what she wants to do--sits around waiting for Santa Claus--can't decide will she get married or be a missionary or raise wire-haired terriers. Poor kid, she's kind of lost, don't you think so?'

'Of course, dear.'

Hazel was wide asleep. But so wrathful was he that, though he had principles about 'getting your beauty sleep', he opened his current detective story and found happiness again: the delights of Chinese daggers, robbers' castles on the Yorkshire moors, baronets bleeding in rooms with locked doors and no windows.

He sighed happily as he came to the end of the tale:

'". . . that whatever you say will be taken down in writing and may be used against you", said Superintendent McCleaver.

'The professor coughed and raised a delicate hand to his pallid lips.

'"Seize him, men!" shouted the superintendent, lumbering out of the unwieldy Tudor chair. Sergeant McBeaver sprang at the professor, then stood appalled as that slim febrile body, all steel and rubber, slumped in the chair, and his head fell sidewise.

'P.C. McDeaver growled, "He must 've had potassium cyanide (KCN) concealed in his hand."

'The superintendent and Dr. Rosecliff exchanged slight smiles, and the Doctor murmured, "Oh no, that wouldn't be, would it? Or would it?"'

Fred Cornplow joined them in the slight smiles. This was fine. He was glad that they had captured the professor; a really dangerous, anti-social gent, given to murdering with fishhooks the spinster aunts of rural deans; but the poor maniac had been helpful to the soya-bean farmers of West Wiltshire. Fred looked tenderly at Hazel and turned off the light, and not till 8 a.m. did he think again of the slings and arrows of outrageous Sara, the sea of troubles that was certain to lave the golden feet of Howard.

Frederick William Cornplow was in his office, at the Triumph agency, and he was busy. He had perceived that it was time to add an agency for trailers to his business, and he had sent his foreman and assistant manager, Paul Popple, out to Chicago to look into the matter of the Duplex Trailer, a new make, only just now in production but promising well.

That left Fred shorthanded. He had no one to sell cars except salesmen, and they had one fault: they could not endure just selling a car; they had to go through their little pieces about the Triumph which, with such agony, they had learned from Fred, and if a customer should attempt to buy a car off the floor, without letting the salesman lift the bonnet and point out that those funny jiggers there were the spark plugs, the salesman would go to pieces.

Fred had finished the morning mail. He had dictated to his secretary his decisions that he wouldn't really care to donate a free car to the Navaho, New Hampshire, Orphanage; nor serve as a committeeman for the Chamber of Commerce annual banquet in honour of Commodore Perry; nor contribute a hundred dollars to the Truxon College badminton association. Pleased that this morning he had been satisfactorily hardhearted, Fred lighted his first cigar of the day (the cigarettes began just after the cornflakes), and clucked, as into the office was ushered his sub-agent, Bert Whizzle, Triumph representative at Enigmaville.

'Well, well, well, Bert, how's the boy?' he said.

'Fine, fine! How's everything by you, Fred?'

'Swell! Couldn't be better! The new Houndtooth station wagon is simply wiping all the other boys off the map. You bet. Well, how's the little woman, Bert?'

'Fine, fine! Just fine and dandy.'

'Fine! And how's the three young uns, Bert?'

'Fine and dandy. Just fine. Say,' and Mr. Whizzle laughed a good deal, 'here was the funniest thing. Here couple nights ago we had the kids' grandma over for supper, and I let Peggy--she's the youngest--only six but bright's a dollar--I let her stay up to say howdy to the old dame, and what d' you think she said to her?'

'What was it? Tell me!' Fred's enthusiasm was as untarnished as on the day, twenty-nine years ago, when, a cadet travelling man in hardware, he had sold his first glamorous order of sixteen tack hammers and one three-tined manure fork.

'Well sir, believe me or not, the little tyke took one look at her grandmother and she pipes up and says, "Say, Gramma, does oo smoke cigarettes?" Well, sir, I thought I'd die! What d' you think of Roosevelt's New Deal, Fred?'

Fred meditated swiftly. Confound it, he couldn't remember whether Mr. Whizzle was a Democrat or a Republican. (It may be added that there were times when Fred could not remember whether he himself was a Sterling Republican or a Loyal Democrat.) He said weightily, 'Way I see it: now you take F.D.R. I'm perfectly certain there ain't a more humanitarian politician in the country--and what a voice on the radio! But same time, the needs and aspirations of the Republicans have got to be given every consideration. Way I see it!'

'You bet! You're dead right,' said Mr. Whizzle feelingly. 'Well say, Fred, got any interest in a couple 'r three orders this morning? Like to make a little dough?'

'Oh, I guess I could stand up under the foul blow--or fell blow, whichever it is. But the fact is . . . Now I don't know whether you'll believe this or not, but I'm not half as interested in the cash as I am in the fun of the game.' He did not believe that Mr. Whizzle believed that he believed anything of the sort, but it made a nice, refined atmosphere.

'Sure. Same way myself, Fred. Well, I've got orders for a Houndtooth convertible coop, de luxe, Persian green; a Triumph two-ton truck, closed body; and a Triumph special four-door sedan, Garden of Allah sand colour.'

'Have 'em for you by to-morrow, if they aren't already in stock,' chuckled Fred, as into the office charged his assistant, Paul Popple, bawling, 'Mr. Cornplow, we've got hold of the biggest thing . . .!'

'Just a minute! Just a minute, Paul! Can't you see I'm busy? You know Mr. Whizzle?'

'Oh--oh sure,' said Popple, as vaguely as a bridegroom. When Mr. Whizzle was gone, Fred turned on Popple with, 'Look here, son! Am I never going to learn you that it's these sub-agents that push off most of the cars we sell? Who do you think you are, anyway?'

'Oh, I'm sorry, but I was all excited. You will be, too.'

'How'd you get back from Chicago so quick? Didn't expect you till to-morrow.'

'Flew, sir.'

'Flew?'

'You bet.'

'In an aeroplane?'

'Nothing less.'

'Well, I'll be doggoned! I've flown, couple of times. But don't know's I liked it so much. Kept wanting to pull up beside the road and rest a little and maybe chew the rag with a filling-station attendant, and then I'd look down and there wasn't any road--just spider webs, down there. I felt like a toad in a cyclone.' His recollections were interrupted by the realization that Popple was jittery with a grandiose impatience, and he complained, 'But what was the idea? What was all the rush?'

'Mr. Cornplow, I think we've gotten hold of a whale of a proposition. I've brought with me a contract giving us not just a district agency but the whole of northern New York State for the Duplex Trailer! I looked it up, and there are six million people in the territory, and if we can't sell fifty thousand Duplexes in the next five years--'

'Take it easy! Get down to brass tacks, Paul. What is this machine for counterfeiting money that you think you've discovered?'

'Honest, Mr. Cornplow, the Duplex is a natural! It's got everything. On the road, it looks like an ordinary high-class passenger trailer, except that it's about eighteen inches higher--which still gives it as much clearance for railroad underpasses as any big furniture truck. Well, in that extra eighteen inches, there's an entire extra story to the trailer, collapsed like a bellows when you're driving.

'The roof of the second story--it's of aeroplane linen, with ribs of ribbon steel--drops right down on the flat roof of the first story, with room between them for collapsible aluminum-alloy beds and chairs, and even collapsible washstands. The sides of the second story are of tarpaulin, and they cave in like an accordion.'

Fred was not interrupting. Fred was a lively enough chatterer when the customers wanted encouragement, but he had trained himself to utter stillness of listening when it should be useful.

'When you make camp, you raise the top roof with compressed air worked from the engine--in two minutes you can raise it, and you've added three separate bedrooms, with tarpaulin partitions and a gangway. And that leaves you a really comfortable big living room and kitchen downstairs. So Pop and Mom and two-three kids can all travel together with some privacy. It's a real moving home! It's a knockout! Look at these photos!'

Fred did look and felt like the first time he had put on radio earphones, heard Philadelphia talking, and guessed that someday he would listen from afar to presidents and kings. Fred had always found business a diverting struggle; he could not understand these superior people who considered trade mechanical and witless; and in the Duplex Trailer he smelled a new adventure.

'I kind of trust your mechanical sense, and you seem to think this Duplex is O.K., Paul. I'll think it over.'

'But I'm afraid you'll have to jump. They can only keep it open for us a few days. Honestly! You'll have to put up ten thousand cash for a start. All they need is that and your signature on the contract.'

And Fred signed. And the bookkeeper notarized. And the office-boy galloped off to the post-office to catch the air mail. And just as Fred leaned back, fretting a little, the Norse god Howard glowed into the office.

'Hello, Dad. H'are you, h'are you?'

'Fine and dandy, Howard. Ribs all right?'

'Grand!'

'What you doing in town?'

'Li'l' party with the Staybridges--Guy's going to introduce Sara and me to his Dad, you know, old Putnam, and his sister Annabel. Course I've met Annabel, dances and so on, but I don't really know her. And a friend of mine, a labour leader--Eugene Silga, his name is--is coming along.'

(It is true that, with 125,000 inhabitants in Sachem Falls, sound burghers like the Cornplows would not, save by accident, be intimate with the proud Staybridges.)

'All right, son. Staying at the house to-night?'

'No, got to buzz back to Truxon and . . . No, no, now wait, Dad. I'll drive like an old lady.'

'You will not! And if you want to break your neck, that's your business, but I'm getting good and tired of paying fines and repair bills, while you loaf through college!'

'But,' with wide, glad innocence, 'that's just what I came to see you about! Dad, I'm not getting anything out of college. The professors are the darnedest lot of crabs and bookworms. What good does it do me to learn about the--the--well, all these things they teach you? Couldn't you give me a job here in the agency?'

'Son, someday I hope you do really settle down and look at things seriously and want to come in with me. Someday I'll be thinking about retiring.'

'You? Never! You like your hand on the steering wheel too well! You'll be shoving off Triumphs on the sub-agents when you're eighty. But how about me starting in here . . .'

'Howard, I don't want to be any crankier than the law allows, but I certainly don't want you here, filling this place up with a lot of your fancy college friends, Guy Staybridge and God knows who all else, smoking and singing and playing contract.'

'Dad, you don't understand! Eugene has shown both Guy and me where . . . We've cut out being aristocrats.'

'Don't tell me!'

'We have. We see now that there's got to be a new world. Youth has got to take charge. Gene and Guy and me have been thinking about starting a cell of the Workers' International Cohesion in Sachem--the "Coheeze" they call it--you know, to make a United Front of all socialists and democrats and liberals and the whole bloomin' lot. I don't intend to have anything more to do with all those snobs and idlers. I'm going to go to work for you, and Guy and me are going to just associate with the intellectuals.'

'D'you think I'd be so crazy to have them make this shop a hangout? It wouldn't be any very big help to my business to have Reds and Bolsheviks and these new Coheezers of yours making speeches from running boards in the showroom, all day long. No, I'm sorry, but you can't come in here till you really want to sell cars because you want to sell cars, if I'm making it clear.'

'You're not, Dad, but . . . Lookit: course I don't want to be a fanatic about these revolutionary activities. Fact, I'd just soon chuck Eugene--you know: I mean, not let him have too much of an undue influence on me. How about me quitting school and taking up aviation? You know what a good driver I am . . .'

'Eh?'

'. . . and I'm dead certain I'd be a good aviator--you know, cross the ocean and everything. Or what do you think of starting a silver fox farm?'

'Or grow frogs' legs?'

It was Fred's supposition that he was being bitter, but the Norse god answered with bright gladness:

'Oh, there'd probably be a lot of money in that, too, but I don't believe frogs would be as much fun to raise as foxes--or aviation. How about it? Do something useful.'

A little wearily, a little savagely, altogether patiently, Fred explained, 'Howard, two years ago you wanted to quit and go to Hollywood. A year ago, when you had that piece about your fraternity dance in your college paper, you were ready to quit and take up your burden as London correspondent for the Associated Press. Listen! I don't necessarily think so much of college. But you've only got a year and a half to go before you get your degree, and if you can't stick that out, you'll have to get along on your own. My guess is that you'd make a first-rate coat holder for some posthole digger on a WPA project that ain't started yet!'

'Why Dad!' It was clear that Howard was hurt. Shocked, surprised, wounded in his filial piety. 'You mean, if I quit college and tried to really make something of myself, say wanted to buy an interest in one of these small broadcasting agencies, you wouldn't back me up?'

'Exactly!'

'Then, gosh, it's all true what Silga says about the Youth Movement: the older generation is trying to crush our aspirations and throttle us economically . . . Oh say, Dad, this Gene is a grand guy, and awfully hard up. Could you let me have twenty-five bucks to lend him?'

'I could not!'

'Well--well--see you again soon.'

Howard departed in complete cheerfulness.

In the heart of Fred, sitting motionless, there was considerably less cheer. He glanced irritably about his office. Yesterday it had been a sparkling gem of efficiency; now it seemed drearily commonplace: merely a desk, a couple of filing cabinets, a tableful of bright catalogues; the inner walls half wood and half clouded glass; the outer windows looking on a cemented yard full of dejected turn-ins with one horrible wreck that confessed a windshield jagged and stained. The only sounds were the rasping screech of valve-grinding, and from the sales floor, just outside, the voice of a salesman: 'Not a chance of your shimmying with a job like this. You can drive over cobblestones like you were in your cradle.'

'Dumb place. Never anything new,' Fred grunted.

It was running smoothly, it was his own machine, but suddenly he did not care whether it ran or not. Was that all that Howard and Sara wanted from him, just to 'back them up'?

This Duplex business: It might be too successful.

He might be caught up again in a delirium of business. Why wasn't it possible, just possibly possible, for Hazel and him to take a little time off, to flee from the pleasant padded servitude of the office, of their home, and see the world? Do a few crazy things like learning to ride horseback--gambling not more'n once or twice at Monte Carlo--trying to play the piano--seeing the Midnight Sun--building furniture--sitting at a small table in the piazza of Venice?

As a voice from beyond the clouds came the thought that, actually, they could do some of those things--do all of them! He was not rich, but he had money enough; the agency was not perfect but, under Paul Popple (not under Howard, by jiminy!), it would get along.

Almost frightened, he ran from the heretical inspiration; jammed on his hat and heavy overcoat; fled to the Sachem Club and the comforting dull talk of Doc Kamerkink and Walter Lindbeck and Ed Appletree.

For--he put it to himself in protest against himself--what the dickens would happen to the world if people ever did what they wanted to?

The present house of the Frederick Cornplows was a good brick Georgian house, on a good street, with a good little lawn and a good big maple tree, and it proved to their world that they were successful. But it was like fifty other residences on Fenimore Cooper Boulevard, which was like five hundred and fifty other handsome boulevards in America.

The residence of Mr. Putnam Staybridge--he who with seeming indifference bore the honour of being the father of Guy--was a museum piece: a square, white, frame object, with a cupola. It seemed to have been built of ice and icily to have defied the common sun. Every piece of furniture, to the last console table and damask-seated chair, belonged rigidly to the period--had in fact been created by one of the most eminent fakers of antiques.

This was fitting, because Mr. Staybridge was what is technically known as of a 'better family' than Fred Cornplow.

A better family is one that has had money or land longer than most; there is nothing more to the trick, and titles and armorial bearings are merely to fool the eye. Nor is it always good taste to ask where the family got the land and money in the first place. The truth about the Norman families of England is that William the Conqueror, a folio edition of Al Capone, stole the country from the Saxons (who had stolen it from the Early English) and divided it among his gang, not yesterday, which would make it criminal, but back around 1100, which is aristocratic, and renders Norman lineage even more important than your golf handicap.

If it had been the Eskimos who had seized England and picked out pretty titles as earls eight hundred years ago, then the Best Families, both British and American, would to-day be claiming descent from Oley the Blubber.

Just so, a Staybridge ancestor, in Salem in the early 1700's, a pious man, fond of sermons about hell-fire, was a shipowner who from the West Indies brought molasses which he distilled into rum, which he shipped to Africa, where it was exchanged for kidnapped Negroes, who were taken as slaves to the West Indies, to be exchanged for molasses, with a profit at every corner of the triangle. So his descendants were able to become college founders, cabinet members, and Putnam Staybridges.

Putnam was so aristocratic that he dared, even in 1936, to wear a small beard. Perhaps he had slid down a little from the family standard, in that he was merely a clock manufacturer and a bank director, but he was first or second cousin to an ambassador, a Harvard professor, an Episcopalian bishop, and to the spouse of a Neapolitan duke; and his stamp collection contained a unique hexagonal black Swiss-Guiana specimen.

When Howard Cornplow lumberingly, Sara tensely, and the black-enamel-eyed organizer, Eugene Silga, placidly, came roaring with Guy into the Staybridge mansion, Putnam was artistically seated in the library, holding an Elzevir Apuleius in his lap and tapping the walnut chair arm with his eyeglasses . . . He had owned the Apuleius for ten years and had not, to date, read ten words beyond the title page. And he had been arranged here, tapping the glasses, for half an hour, ever since Guy had telephoned to announce this dreadful visitation.

He arose, for the purpose of bowing to Sara, looking quizzically at Howard, and snubbing Gene Silga, and went back to sitting, to tapping, and to glancing at his book.

Behind him was his daughter, Annabel, and Annabel was, to be brief, a darling. She was a tousled, smiling, shy, sloppy, brown-haired, easygoing, very pretty, happily cynical darling of nineteen or twenty, and Howard looked upon her--she looked upon the Norse god--with young rapture. Years ago they had met, at dances, but since she had been chased off to school at Farmington, they had never said anything more ardent than 'Mave nexdance?'

Howard was jarred out of his adoration by Mr. Putnam Staybridge's answer to whatever it was Guy had been babbling:

'So you intend to inaugurate in Sachem Falls a chapter of the Workers' International Cohesion--the Coheeze? Delightful name; so suitable to a young man like yourself, Guy, who was brought up to the traditions of Henry Adams. You purpose to start a monthly called Protest & Progress, nicknamed "P. & P.", to be cheaply printed and to unite the underprivileged of the entire world--no mean feat for three young men, even when abetted by so charming a young lady as Miss Sara Cornplow, considering that all the revolutionists in the world, including the accomplished Mr. Lenin, have hitherto failed to achieve this. And you wish me to contribute a sum which, I should judge from your slightly hysterical exposition, Guy, would be approximately a hundred dollars? . . . Now, Mr. Silga, will you be so good as to tell me whether this Protest & Progress will be definitely communistic?'

'Not in the least, sir.' Gene was calm, and Gene's smile was tender.

'It will not be under the eventual control of the Party, or whatever you may call the organization that receives orders from Moscow?'

'Oh no. The purpose of the "P. & P.", Mr. Staybridge, will be to unite people of all political faiths who believe in scientific control of politics, whether they are Republicans or Reds--except that, I'm sure, the Reds will denounce us as wishy-washy.'

Mr. Staybridge arose quietly. He murmured, 'In that case, I shall give Guy a cheque for one hundred dollars for your enterprise, on condition that no copy of the blasted sheet shall ever be brought into this house!'

He went beautifully up to his bedroom and read the same detective story that Fred Cornplow was, just then, reading at home.

When his father was safely gone, Guy fretted:

'But lookit, Gene, of course "P. & P." will be pro-communist.'

'Of course.'

'But you told Father it wouldn't be.'

'Of course I did.'

'But that's a lie.'

'Of course it is. Do you intend to go down to police headquarters and pin up posters announcing we're going to take over the constabulary, soon as we get the strength?'

Howard intruded, while the thrushlike Annabel Staybridge admired his copper-shining nobleness:

'Thunder, no, Guy, you certainly wouldn't do that?'

'No, maybe not,' said Guy, rubbing his large Staybridge nose, wiping his spectacles, in a jittery manner. It was only of late that he had gone from poetry into the lusher fields of communism and Holy Russia.

Gene exulted, 'With the seven-fifty the New York Coheeze has promised us, that makes eleven hundred and fifty dollars we've raised to start Protest & Progress. Think you can get a hundred out of your father, Howard--Sara?'

'Well, the old man is pretty down on the Reds, but he's a kindhearted old skate, if you're patient and let him get his bellyaching over,' rejoiced Howard.

'Even without it, we'll be able to get out one number, anyway--and what a terrible printing job that's going to be!' said Gene.

Eugene was a year or two younger than the Dianic Sara, a quarter of an inch shorter, and not having, like Sara, studied French at Vassar, he could not speak it. (Neither could Sara.) But so easy was he, so understandingly did those bright dark eyes look into her, that Sara was flattered to be called by her first name, was captivated by Gene's power--the result of his excellent endocrine glands--and interpreted it as her conversion to communism. She had done a little communism, just as she had done a little tennis, Thomas Wolfe, golf, Bach diving, William Faulkner, biochemistry, Buddhism, vegetarianism, and Buchmanism. Now she plunged deep, and at one end of Putnam Staybridge's chaste drawing-room Guy and Eugene and she happily agreed that within five years Putnam would be set by the American Soviets to digging canals.

But Annabel and Howard were at the other end of the apartment, and nothing like so revolutionary.

'Gosh, Miss Staybridge, I'm sorry I never really had a chance to get acquainted with you. You must of been just a kid when you went off to school.'

'Yes, I was--just a skinny awkward kid. But then I guess I still am, Mr. Cornplow.'

'You are not! Say, gosh, Miss Staybridge, you got more darn gracefulness and the loveliest lips I ever did see.'

'Oh, now you're flattering me, Mr. Cornplow. You college pundits! I'm just another young female, where you're a regular movie star. You play football at Truxon, don't you?'

'Well--that is--course I'm on the scrub team. The captain and the coach ganged up on me. They claim I'm lazy, just because they said I had to live on prunes and bran and go to bed at nine, and I told 'em where they got off! "I'm not going to bed at any nine o'clock and I'm not going to eat any prunes", I told 'em. No sir! Prunes! Don't you think so?'

'Oh, absolutely, Mr. Cornplow . . . Prunes!'

'I bet you love to dance, Miss Staybridge.'

'Oh, I adore it, but not with any of these little shrimps--only with tall men--and I've noticed that all you golden-haired boys, I don't know why it is, but somehow, you always dance so well.'

'Me? Golden-haired? It's just plain, dumb red--tray ordinary.'

'Oh, it is not red! It's gold.'

'It's red!'

'Gold!'

They dived into laughter--Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Mrs. Nickleby and the vegetable marrows.

At the other end of the room, Gene Silga explaining that in Russia--to which he had never been nearer than Fall River--the least skilful workman has a better time than any Detroit foreman: free lectures and a chance to do parachute jumping.

The revolutionary conspirators, the two lovers, could hear from above them an irritable pacing.

'That's Father, registering indignation,' sighed Guy. 'Don't it beat the Dutch how unsympathetic all fathers are!'

This beginning of the open season on parents drew the romantics back to the general hunting party, as Sara observed, 'Doesn't it! My father, old Freddie, wants to do the right thing by his offspring, sometimes dismayingly so, but he has no imagination; he can't understand that young people aren't altogether content to play bridge every evening and go to bed at ten-thirty. Why--why--he still wears a nightshirt instead of pyjamas!'

'No!' marvelled Guy.

'He's lucky. I usually don't have on anything at night except an undershirt,' said Gene.

'I'll bet Mr. Cornplow does so have imagination,' protested Annabel. 'I mean, I don't really know your father very well, but I talked to him once about getting a new car--Mr. Putnam Staybridge sure quenched that maiden's dream--and I thought your father was swell. He was so kind and he joked so . . .'

'Naturally, if he thought he could sell you a car!' said Sara. 'Oh, Dad really is kind, or means to be, but he hasn't got the imagination to see that the younger generation wants something more than being a respected resident of Cooper Boulevard. It's impossible for him to conceive that we, that Youth, no longer wants anything merely for itself, but demands that the whole world be freed of the bonds of capitalism.' She looked to Eugene for approval, and got it, from his well-trained professional smile. 'Why . . . Look, Annabel--I may call you Annabel, mayn't I?--doesn't your father travel a lot?'

'Sure. Comrade Putnam is even worse than the kind of globe-trotter that shows you his snapshots--he's the kind that sneaks off to Vienna and Rio and then gloats at you and won't even tell you what he's seen.'

Sara was relentless: 'Well, Dad won't travel one bit. Doesn't want to travel. And he can perfectly well afford to, the rest of his life. Why, time and again I've offered to take him to Paris--think of it, I've never been there myself!--and he always says, "We'll see", and sneaks out of it. Positively, Freddie enjoys being an old horse in a treadmill. I believe, no matter how he kicks about it, he's secretly pleased when we sponge on him. Shows what a noble, stalwart pillar of society he is! We must see to it that he contributes to the Coheeze.'

'Yes, we must see to that,' said Gene.

'Anyway, this whole business of parents,' began Guy, the poet, philosopher and pal, 'is a funny--well, it's a funny business. I think they ought to appreciate their children for taking the trouble to represent them in the new social movements, the socialization of education and the extension of labour unionism, since they're too old-fashioned to do it themselves. But say, speaking of your dad, how's to skip down to your house? There's Putnam making unfriendly noises upstairs again.'

'Grand! Come along! It's only ten-forty. Dad will be glad to see us.'

Howard was buoyant, and Annabel followed him in demure obedience. And Sara hinted no opposition after she had looked at Eugene and found him ready, and after she covered all points by explaining:

'Well . . . All right.'

Fred had wound his watch, he had listened to the broadcaster's opinion that to-morrow it would rain in Omaha and parts of West Virginia, and he had proffered to Hazel his nightly observation, 'How about turning in and getting a little sleep?' The front door crashed, and in, like a flock of sheep with the voices of crows, tumbled Sara, Howard, Eugene, Guy, Annabel.

But when Fred had been presented to Annabel, he was sweet to her--too sweet, thought Hazel.

Sara purred, 'Father, Mother, this is Eugene Silga of the Workers' International Cohesion. I think you've heard Howard speak of him.'

'Oh yes, yes, sure, you bet!' crowed Fred, shaking hands.

Gene's thin hands were hard, and his eyes half friendly, half shrewd, altogether cynical. The comedian Fred, who all day long shouted stories, became cautious and dead quiet.

'Sara has been telling me about your two-story trailer,' said Eugene to him.

'Yes?'

'I'll remember it, next time I have anything to do with a demonstration in Union Square. Speech from the second story might go over big. I'm not sure you approve, but I'm interested in radical labour unions, Mr. Cornplow.'

Sara flared, 'Oh, why don't you tell 'em you're a communist and a party member, Mr. Silga--Eugene? It won't hurt 'em!'

Fred was more cautious than ever. 'No, it won't hurt us at all. I heard you were a communist, Mr. Silga, when you were mixed up in the Pragg glass-works strike. But here's something even stranger than that. Me, I'm a Republican and go to church!'

From Hazel there was a faint squawk that sounded like, 'When?' as Fred went on selling:

'I'm glad to meet you, I won't pretend I like communism, but I much prefer you out-and-out advocates to the limousine socialists, like Sara here, who say, No, it wasn't the communism, it was something they ate; who cuss out capitalism and go right on living on it.'

'I don't know, Mr. Cornplow. An agitator finds limousines awfully useful sometimes, for escaping from the cops.'

'Hm. Yes. Glad meet you. I've been reading where it's become the fashion for the Reds to shave and bathe and leave the bombs home . . .'

'Sorry, never seen a bomb.'

'. . . in the bottom bureau drawer, and I'm interested to see that it's true, Gene.'

With warm-hearted aid from Guy and Howard, derisiveness from Annabel, and watchful silence from Eugene, Sara portrayed for Fred and Hazel the future of the Coheeze, and of the monthly Protest & Progress, which was to bring to far-flung workers in byre and grange and speak-easy the surprising news that, if they were real toilers and not parasites, like Fred, all Irishmen, Chinese, Japanese, Germans, Frenchmen, Spanish leftists, Spanish rightists, Negroes, Californians, Floridians, New York garment workers, Vermont apple growers, and pearl divers in Borneo loved one another to death.

'What do I do about it?' weasled Fred.

'Why, you contribute!' Sara laughed heartily.

'Not me. I laid off loving the workers when the last automobile strike prevented my getting any cars to sell for couple of months, right at the height of the season.'

Sara protested, 'Guy's father, Mr. Staybridge, has given us a hundred dollars. Are you going to let him beat you?'

'Absolutely! Guy, you tell your father I'll let him contribute the whole doggone fund, if he wants to.'

'Oh, Dad!' (That was Sara again.)

Hazel spoiled everything:

'Fred, if Sara is enjoying this so much, and I'm sure Mr. Silga could tell us such interesting things about Russia, sex and divorces and how much the servants get and all--I do hope he'll be willing to lecture before the Egeria Club, it's my turn next month to get a speaker--and if Sara is having a good time out of it, I'm going to donate fifty dollars myself! Out of my own money, I mean!'

Fred goggled, remembering that Hazel's 'own money', from the estate of an unexpected uncle, had last year brought in $786.10, of which, to his knowledge, she had spent over nine hundred. While Hazel was being thanked, Fred craftily led Annabel apart and fished:

'Didn't know you knew my boy, Miss Staybridge.'

'Oh, I don't, really. I've just met him at dances.'

'That's probably the best place to meet him. I'd steer clear of him in the classroom.'

'Don't you guarantee him?'

'Well, he uses an awful lot of oil and gas and he backfires going uphill, not down, and his brakes are slipping. But he's got a nice three-coat finish, and I kind of like him.'

'So do I!'

Everyone else was lounging; everyone was chattering; Hazel was explaining to Gene Silga what a wonderful time they had had at the Egeria Club when they had entertained a pupil of Dale Carnegie, who had informed them that the ability to express one's self on one's feet was as important to a clubwoman as it was even to a senator or a lubricant salesman. But Annabel sat straight, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes straight ahead, in a trance. Her lips seemed very soft; Fred thought that they would tremble, if she was hurt. She seemed to him made not of patches of prejudice and unimportant informations, like the rest, but to be all of one piece, clear and sure and kind.

'She'll fall in love with Howard because he looks like a movie star, and then keep it up because she'll be sorry for him,' sighed Fred to himself. 'He'll wear her out. Here, quit it! Don't crab about your own son. Way Annabel's looking round, guess she likes it here--kind of free and easy--or would be if Sara wasn't so doggone high-minded--in comparison with Staybridge, that old stiff. But Annabel--got the friendliest eyes I ever saw--friendly 's a pup--I'd like to have Howard safely married to a good loyal girl like her, but do I want to see her married to a loafer? Duties of parents? Someday I'll chuck the lot of 'em . . . I won't!'

By request of Sara, Eugene Silga outstayed Annabel and Guy. After ten minutes' discussion of the fact that, if he started in five minutes, he could be in Truxon at a fair hour, Howard went up to bed; and Eugene and Fred, with the Cornplow women for gallery, circled about each other.

Let us be clear about the political activities of Eugene Silga. He was not at all like the melodramatic Bolsheviks of British detective stories; he had no secret gang with an abbey crypt for hideout, no beautiful phoney countess (in black with a platinum dog collar) for spy. Fred suspected that Sara's radical toying, suddenly become so active this evening, meant nothing more than a desire to be important, to be Different, and to associate with romantic young men. But Gene's purpose was clear. He had hated the bland and rich ever since his infanthood in a riverside slum in Brooklyn. Making his way at City College of New York by pressing clothes had not improved his benevolence. He wanted power and revenge; he was willing to risk death in the hope of smashing the entire democratic system and winding up with the factory workers dictatorially running the country, and himself running the workers.

Both Sara and he did love humanity. Whether either of them loved a single individual human being was less certain.

Eugene did not come out of the comic papers. He was neither dirty-necked nor bellowing, nor had he any especial tropism for soapboxes. He was neat and quiet-voiced; he smiled affectionately; and he was, to the world of Fred Cornplow--to the world of Franklin and Emerson and Mark Twain, of Willa Cather and William Allen White--as dangerous as a rattlesnake.

There is a vulgar error about rattlesnakes. Hordes of sensible people assume that it is treacherous in a rattlesnake to bite the tourists, but to himself a rattlesnake is an honest, kind-hearted family man who believes that human beings treacherously kill a lot more rattlesnakes than snakes kill humans.

Eugene was telling Fred about the Youth Movement.

'It's not purely a communist doctrine. We're willing to make a United Front with the liberals and even lukewarm socialists. I've just been out at a Youth Convention in Cincinnati. We're demanding of Congress . . .'

'Demanding?'

'Certainly! Demanding that all young people up to twenty-five--oh, I'm a year beyond that limit, so it's not personal--be granted college educations with all expenses paid, free cigarettes, free movies twice a week, and jobs at union wages guaranteed after college.'

Fred was gulping, but Sara stopped him with, 'Now, Dad, please don't tell us again how you waited on table at college, and then went to work at seven dollars a week.'

It was Hazel who, surprisingly, led the attack: 'I never could quite understand the Youth Movement. I know; so many of the boys and girls are having a dreadful time getting started, nowadays. But is it any harder on them when they can't find a job than it is on a man of forty-five, with a sick wife and three children?'

'That's scarcely an answer,' condescended Eugene, while inwardly Fred began to rage that, 'Doggone it, this Silga fellow acts like he owned the house. Pretty soon he'll give us lessons in how to drive a car, if we'll just pay strict attention.'

'That's scarcely an answer. Naturally, I believe in guaranteeing work, with a maximum week's labour of thirty hours and a minimum wage of fifty dollars, for all workers, whether they are twenty-five or sixty-five. But our chief concern is with Youth, because it has a chance to be educated: it isn't blinded by the American myth that this is a democracy and that everybody still has a chance.'

While Fred tried to look relaxed and impartial, and did look as relaxed and impartial as a cat on flypaper, Eugene informed him that all automobile workers' wages could easily be doubled if the manufacturers would get rid of the middleman (such as Fred Cornplow); that it was a good thought that Great Britain would soon lose India and Egypt, France lose Indo-China, and Holland lose Java; that it was an even better thought that during the first three months of the Next War, Russia would take over Alaska, western Canada, China, Scandinavia and Poland, and make their inhabitants as joyous as the Russian peasants. So, by easy stages, they came to Spain, where, everyone said, there would be a dangerous right revolution before long.

Eugene announced, and quite politely, 'I've talked it all over with Sara, Mr. Cornplow and--I hope you won't think it's impertinent of us, but we find that the only way to get proper contributions for the Spanish government is to figure out quotas for different contributors, and let them know.'

'But I'm not a con . . .'

'And Sara and I feel that you could show that you really do believe in democracy and popular rule by contributing five hundred dollars to the Spanish government and . . .'

'Five hun . . .'

'Certainly! Heaven knows I can't give anything, with my wretched income,' snarled Sara.

Fredk Wm, who gave her that income, didn't think it was at all wretched, considering his own resources. A thousand a year and all found? So that was wretched, was it? He spoke with spirit and wrath:

'Look here, you young people, I'm getting tired of being badgered. I know I'm just a millionaire capitalist--just a multi-millionaire, that's all, nothing but a face grinder and an orphan robber, just a foe of the oppressed. Sure, I understand that horny-handed proletarians like you two have got to destroy capitalists like me--certainly--just take us out and destroy us--put us up against a wall and destroy us--take away my steam yacht and my French château and my wife's ruby necklace--just take 'em away and stick us up against a wall and fill us full of holes. That's the proper caper, just destroy us. Only, I don't expect to contribute for the privilege of being destroyed! I'll be content with just being shot; let the other fellow pay for the bullets.

'No, wait now, Sara. I know, when you open your mouth like a fish, I'm going to get hell. But you listen to me first, for a while.

'I do read the newspapers. Seriously, I do know there's a lot of things wrong in this world; mining is dangerous and badly paid; Tom Mooney was rail-roaded and ought to be released; the Southern share croppers have a terrible time--and so do most of the plantation owners!--a lot of priests and college professors get sent to prison in Europe for telling the truth; the Negroes get an awful deal; a lot of farmers just work to feed their mortgages.

'But unlike you communists, I don't feel that I'm Almighty God. I can't do everything in the world at once. I'm the president of the Mind Your Own Business Association. I'm just not rich enough and not smart enough to rebuild the New York slums and stop all war at one and the same time. I don't think I've done so bad with my own job. My workmen and my customers both seem pretty well satisfied. I get along all right with my own family . . .'

'Do you?' breathed Sara.

That hurt. It seemed to Fred equally pertinent and impertinent. He went on less confidently.

'I mean . . . And so . . . Well, as I was trying to say: I don't pretend to be a Rockefeller. I'm just a plain ordinary citizen of Sachem Falls, N.Y., and you highbrows, who love to talk so much about realism and seeing clearly, ought to appreciate the fact that I know what I am.'

Hazel had looked at Fred sympathetically, and she charged up with reinforcements. With the most restful prosiness, she told Eugene about the Spreadeagle Little Theatre of Sachem, about Howard's remarkable success in baseball, as a boy, and about her cousins in California. This warm bath soothed them all, and Eugene eased out, with an abstracted farewell which said that he would never come back.

'Did you really have to go out of your way to be insulting?' demanded Sara.

'Not very far! I never could understand why it was that thirty years ago we were supposed to be apologetic to all the visiting firemen from France and England for being American, and now we're expected to apologize to Russia. When this young pup hits me in a tender spot . . .'

'Your pocket-book, Father!'

'You bet! It's what you've always lived on, isn't it, young lady, if you want me to be vulgar?'

'I don't!'

'Well, when he sashays in here and tells me my duty . . .'

'I wonder you didn't spring on him something refreshing like, "If you don't like it here, why don't you go back where you came from?"'

'Well, I did think of taking that up, but I wasn't sure he came from some country I disliked enough to wish him off on it! But I respect him more than I do you. He has the decency to be openly a threat to every doggone thing I stand for, and risk his life in strikes, and prob'ly he lives on fifteen-twenty bucks a week, while the young folks like you sponge on your parents for all you can get, and are ashamed of yourselves for it, and take it out on us!'

'Father!'

'Absolutely. Maybe you're not to blame personally. Whole country's full of smart young people whose folks have sent 'em to school and done all they could to help 'em socially and financially, and the kids despise 'em for being so soft, and don't for one second hesitate to correct their parents' manners and historical dates! But I don't intend to have any of those intellectual snobs in my house, not if I know it! Young lady, after children get to be eighteen or so, they have no more claim on their parents' affection than anybody else. They've got to earn it!'

Sara rushed from the room, sobbing.

Fred paced a good deal.

'Oh, hang it, I didn't mean . . . But that girl, Sara, she got me so riled up, just when I'd laid myself out to be so polite to her and that dark-eyed comrade, that Bolshevik gigolo! Why can't they be nice, like Annabel? There's my daughter. Not sure I'll let her marry Howard, the stuffed sweater! But Sara . . . All right, all right! Shall I wait and apologize to her to-morrow, or go up and get it over now?'

The renowned Old Home Week of Sachem Falls was held in March, however inclement, because that month marked the birthday of the city's one revolutionary hero, General Abram Pough, of whom no one knew anything except that he had been a hero, that he had almost certainly been born, that he had been born in March, and that he had not been born at the celebrated Pough Birthplace, on Beecher Street. The annual Home Week parade was, by custom, the occasion for the first outdoor showing of the new automobile models, an attraction altogether more interesting than General Pough to the citizenry.

It was in this parade that Fred exhibited the first Duplex Trailers beheld in Sachem. His assistant, Paul Popple, had fretted, 'Say, Chief, I've got the low-down on what the Conqueror people are going to do. They're showing six models, all decorated with hot-house flowers. What say we have ours tied up with gold ribbons?'

'I'm not selling ribbons. Nor gold. Nor flowers. I'm selling automobiles. I'll work out our display,' snorted Fred.

Paul Popple was doubtful, Hazel was doubtful, and Sara was shocked when, in the Old Home Week parade, after floats showing the Dutch first settlers making cheese and consequently being scalped by the Iroquois, after the American Legion and the Sons of Sweden and the pickle-works exhibit and the Woodmen of America, rich in axes and badges, after the elegant display of the rival Conqueror Motor Company, ornate with roses and daffodils, came the eccentric display arranged by Fred. Leading it was a Triumph town car, and in that car was the mayor of Sachem, who owed Fred three hundred dollars. The spectators, packed in like baled hay and encouraged by dollar-a-day clappers hired by Fred, applauded with an apparent feeling that this was official and the Triumph must, therefore, be a very good car indeed. Following was a Houndtooth Six, and, to Sara's wan disapproval, it lacked not only flowers and ribbons, but even a decent body. There was only the chassis, without fenders and with the driver on a greasy wooden box. But the crowd was stirred by seeing the wheels go round, and jammed in close to the Houndtooth, crying, 'Look, Bill, the way them brakes work!'

After it rolled six Duplex Trailers, and this was the first time that any outsider in Sachem had seen a Duplex.

The trailers were in busy action. The extra second story of each was being raised or taken down. The crowd gasped and gurgled, and Hazel patted Fred's cheek in wonder, as she saw three bedrooms magically created out of air.

The news stories about the parade, later, in all three papers, could not ignore this innovation--particularly as Fred had promised each of them a full-page Duplex advertisement. In each news story was a paragraph to the effect: 'The surprise of the show, however, was a fleet of Duplex Trailers, which unfold to provide a second story.'

Fred had sold six Duplexes before twilight the next day.

But at home, quiet beside Hazel on the couch, listening to a nostalgic Hawaiian radio quartette (from the Bronx), Fred pondered, 'Yuh, it was a good show. I'm a swell salesman and a good showman. But--funny--the kick don't seem to last. I felt kind of naked out there, watching the Duplexes dress and undress in public. Am I getting tired of just being a showman, honey? Then what 'll I do?

He did not speak to Hazel, he didn't even speak to himself, about the important occurrence of the Old Home Week parade.

During the passing of the Duplexes, Fred had wandered away from Hazel, to greet possible customers, and in the crowd had come upon Putnam Staybridge and Annabel.

But for the treachery of George Washington, Mr. Staybridge would now be Gen. the Rt. Hon. Sir Putnam Staybridge, P.C., D.S.O., K.C.M.G., and though he had been robbed of this rightful label, yet in the precision of his little beard, the quiet intolerance of his grey eyes, the erectness of his frail shoulders, Mr. Staybridge showed his private knightliness. He was devoting it now to sneering at the Duplex demonstration, and it did not help Fred to know that Mr. Staybridge had some unacknowledged interest in the opposition Conqueror Motor Company.

'How d'you do, Mr . . . Cornplow,' said Mr. Staybridge. But Fred felt that he didn't really much care how he did, or whether he did at all. Putnam was already ignoring him while he acknowledged the passing of a woman acquaintance by pinching the top of his hat and slightly widening his lips, like the stretching of a rubber band.

But Annabel was beaming. Fred flagrantly winked at her.

Five minutes later, while Fred was watching the passing of the Boy Scouts, someone plucked at his sleeve, and he looked down--not very far down--on a shy Annabel.

He comprehensively remarked, 'Well, well!'

'Father's gone and . . .'

'You stay with me. I'll guard you. I used to be a G-man.'

'Honestly?'

'Absolutely. I captured Jesse James.'

'Jesse James wasn't captured. He was shot in the back by a member of his gang.'

Fred looked on Annabel with favour. How rare it was, he thought, to find anyone under thirty these days who was not dazzled by the movies and aviation, but knew such sanctities of American history as the James Boys. 'Good girl,' he said. He could not treat her like a Staybridge. She really seemed human. He grumbled, 'Afraid your father didn't care much for my trick trailers, Miss Staybridge.'

'I'm afraid he enjoys not caring for much of anything. Uh . . . uh . . .' Annabel twisted a button of his coat. 'Have you seen Howard?'

'Not for a few days. He's coming down for my birthday party, at the house, week from next Tuesday. Look! Why don't you come?'

'I'd love to, Mr. Cornplow!'

He envied the clear light of Annabel in a foggy, complicated world.

'By golly,' he swore, 'if Howard don't fall properly in love with her, I'll--well, I'll do the worst thing to him I possibly can: I'll let him do what he thinks he wants to do--leave college and go to work!'

The house of Frederick William Cornplow was filled with openly secret preparations for his fifty-sixth birthday, next day. He sat in plump contentment, awaiting dinner and snorting over the evening paper, and all life seemed secure.

The doorbell rang then, and all the forgotten sorrows of life trooped in.

Hilda, the maid, announced, 'There's some folks here, name of Tillery, Enos Tillery and his folks; they say they want to see you.'

'Tillery? Never heard . . . Oh, wait.'

With creeping horror Fred remembered that he did have some second-hand cousins of that ominous name. One Joe Tillery, from back yonder. Not since boyhood had he seen any of the tribe, but he remembered them, in a paintless farm shanty, unbathed, uncombed, insolvent and full of jolly music; he remembered his father giving Joe a tenth of the ten dollars which Joe had modestly solicited. This Enos Tillery would be Joe's faithful son.

Fred stalked into the hall. With touching trustfulness he hoped that the Tillerys would get no farther.

By the door, looked appallingly friendly, was a man of Fred's own age--Enos, presumably--whose hair had not been cut for two months nor his cheeks shaven for four days, but who displayed checked plus-fours, golf stockings purple and leaf-green, and a moth-eaten red sweater. Enos was reinforced by his wife, in a tweed coat with a fur collar which needed combing, as did her greasy black hair, and by two lumps of grown sons and a small boy and a small girl.

Now Fred had resolutely freed himself of the heresy, held by his father and his father's friends, that there was disgrace in poverty and evil in the poor. On the other hand, he had not slipped into the new credo that poverty and bad luck and dirt are always and necessarily superior to thrift and good fortune and soap . . . And perhaps he wouldn't have cared a hang, one way or the other, but he was that most shrewdly disciplined of beings, a Good Family Man, and as the Tillerys broke out in a rash of smiles that to the experienced tradesman meant cases of the helping-themselves hand, Fred was itchily conscious that Hazel might be peeping around a corner and refusing to forgive him for having brought these relatives into the world.

Enos was shouting, 'Well, well, it's fat little Freddie Cornplow, the old thief! Remember how you used to pinch apples, at our farm, and Dad walloped the daylights out of you? Remember how you were scared to go swimming in the crick? Oh, those were the great days!'

From the blue distances of jocund Youth, there seemed to float past Fred a delicate odour of the Tillery pigpen. But he got out shakily:

'Oh, yuh, sure--yuh, that's right. So this is the family.'

'Yes, here's Edna, the wife, and Mac and Cal, the big fellows, and little Tom and Sagittaria.'

Fred did not understand it, but somehow they were no longer in the hall; they were in the living-room, seated, and Cal had helped himself to a cigarette, Mrs. Tillery to candy, while Tom and Sagittaria were bouncing gleefully on the couch, whose springs were none too hale.

(But you couldn't turn down your relatives, your own cousins, now could you? Blood thicker than--thicker 'n glue, this time . . . But golly, if Sara came in!)

Enos was caroling, 'Well, sir, we're kind of driving down towards West Virginia--fellow told us there was some kind of Rural Resettlement project down there where we could get a farm free, and all the tools. I noticed we was right near here, and I says to Edna, that's the wife, "We'll just drop in on fat little Freddie--not make any trouble--maybe he's got engagements--not give him and his woman . . ." Eglantine, that's your wife's name, ain't it?'

'Hazel.'

'Hazel? Kind of a hick name. She just a plain farmer, too, like you and me, Fred? Well, anyway, Edna says no--says it's almost forty years since you and me have seen each other--you wouldn't want to entertain us, she says, but I says "Of course he'll want to see a cousin!" I says. "Wouldn't I be tickled to death to give him a shakedown if I had a house and if him and his family come along?" . . . How many kids you got, Fred?'

'Two.'

'Oh well, you never were much good. Six, I've got--these four, and another one that's got a fine job selling patent medicines, and the other--well, he had kind of bad luck, and 's matter of fact, he was innocent, but he's in the reformatory, and . . . Anyway, "No," I says to Edna, "of course he'll be glad to see us. What's relatives for?" I says. "Fred may have gone and got rich, but I'll bet he don't think he's too good for his own people--I'll bet that at heart he's just a dumb, plain rube like the rest of us." Is that steak I smell?'

Fred was by now in a simple state of dementia. Beyond question he knew that if he invited his kin, and perhaps kind, to dinner, Hazel would kill him and Sara cremate him. He stuttered:

'H-had your supper, E-Enos?'

'Not yet! Ready to eat an ox!'

'How you fixed for money?'

Enos laughed. His wife laughed. His young laughed. Enos giggled, 'You wouldn't kid me, would you? You always were a great little kidder.' He arose to run at Fred and jab him in the ribs--unnecessarily, Fred thought. 'Between us, we've got about a dollar and a half.'

'Well, you let this be my treat. Here's five dollars, Enos.'

Enos took the bill not at all reluctantly; the only reluctance was in his yearning venture, 'But wouldn't it maybe be cheaper to feed us here, Freddie? Not but what I could take the five bucks too, if you insist!'

Enos laughed. His wife laughed. His young . . .

Reduced already to the state of a pitiful liar, and not a very good liar, Fred implored, 'We've got some folks coming in for dinner . . .'

'That's all right with me, if it is with you. I could run down to the store and get couple cans of beans . . .'

Desperately, 'No, guess we better have it this way.'

'Well, look, Freddie, I don't want to be a nuisance. No man living can say I've ever been a bother to nobody. I've often said, "I may not have much of this world's goods, but I've worked and worked hard for what I've got, and one thing I always been proud of is, I've been independent." Neither a borrower be nor a lender, like the fellow says. But I was wondering if you happened to have any spare rooms we could stay in, just for to-night--maybe a couple of nights, so the children could look over the town. Educate 'em. We wouldn't be a bit of trouble. The younger kids could just well sleep here in the sitting-room.'

'Uh--uh--afraid our guests will be staying . . .'

Fred's brow was sopping; he wished that he could again try Sara's clinical thermometer.

'Enos!' said his wife.

'Huh?'

'Beat it!' said his wife.

'Me?'

'All of us. Scram!' said his wife.

'All right . . . Now there's just one other thing, Freddie. Happen to know about any jobs for Mac and Cal here? Course I want to grab me that Gov'ment farm, but the boys are real good at fixing cars. Both worked in filling stations, and of course with your big agency . . .'

'What have they done?'

'Cal, he was in the CCC for a while, but he didn't care so much for it, and then he hitched up with the WPA, but say, those WPA bosses are fierce, they expect you to work like it was a real paid job, and then he was kind of a sweeper in a factory and afterwards, he had a couple of days cooking in a lunch wagon when the fellow was sick, but Cal didn't seem to take to that so much, and here lately he hasn't hardly been doing anything, you might say, just travelling with us--we had a real interesting time--most of the winter we was in Florida, but we had kind of a run-in with the authorities. Oh yes, Cal's a good worker, providin' he has a boss that understands he's high-strung and nobody that you can cuss and knock around. But Mac . . . Well, he reads a lot, but he hasn't had Cal's experience. But what the dickens! No use worrying. Gov'ment owes everybody a living, don't it?'

Fred rose. The others didn't. He had to make it severe--at least he tried to make it severe, even in face of Enos's leering remembrance of himself as fat little Freddie Cornplow:

'Enos! Have Cal and Mac come to see me at the Triumph agency to-morrow, between ten and twelve. I'll see if I can't put them to work.'

It took half an hour before the Tillerys oozed out of the house, during which period Hazel peeped in and looked at Fred like the Gorgon sisters; it took five days and a hundred dollars before Fred coaxed them to ooze out of Sachem. As Mac and Cal were only half an hour late in coming to see him the next day, he put both of them at work, washing though rarely cleaning cars.

The brief comedy of the Tillerys affected him as biliously as Sara's conversion to communism or Howard's desire to leave college.

Fred had not hugely differed from Enos Tillery in a simple faith that a man is as chained to his family, even to all of his blessedly lost relatives, as he is to the law and the prophets and his most understanding friends. But the affaire Tillery, coming just a day before the family gathering on his fifty-sixth birthday, left him in a shocking state of tribal infidelity.

'My own bunch are Hazel, and now Annabel, and friends like Doc Kamerkink and Walter Lindbeck--none of them blood relations, thank heaven!' he blasphemed, and, greatly daring, he wondered whether he was compelled to serve the desires of even Howard and Sara, unless they should choose to be his friends as well as his children.

At dinner, Hazel said, 'Did I hear those people say they were cousins of yours? Why didn't you invite them to dinner?'

The living-room was littered with crocuses and daffodils, lilies and hothouse roses, for Fred's birthday party, and he, who hated this clammy reminder of advancing years, grumbled, 'Sure! Getting me used to my funeral by degrees!'

The dining-room was set out with the gold-and-sky-blue Limoges plates, cut-glass dishes of Hazel's celebrated brandied peaches, and gold-rimmed, faintly etched wineglasses, from which they would each drink two doses of champagne, except for Fred, who would have three, and Annabel Staybridge, who would have ginger ale.

The more he disliked birthdays, the more Fred drove himself to be merry and grateful, particularly when they produced the surprise gifts, which he had already viewed, in their hiding-place in the linen closet, with disapproval. The gifts were also a give-away of the donors. Fred had complained that he hadn't a dressing-gown long enough to cover his nervous feet on a winter morning, and from Hazel he had a woolly robe large enough to cover the feet of Jumbo. But it was of a dizzying purple, edged with fiery red cord, and the sash, he was certain, would never stay tied. Howard gave him a framed photograph--of Howard; and from his friends and guests Dr. and Mrs. Kamerkink, he had a pipe. It was the second pipe they had given him, and Fred never smoked a pipe, but the Doc believed that for a gentleman of forty and upwards a pipe was more manly and hygienic than cigarettes.

Fred gabbled, 'Mighty handsome pipe. Imported from England? Golly!'

Sara was responsible for a dreadful bottom-shelf book, A Statistical Survey of the Diminishing Returns of the Capitalist System, whose sour cover contrasted with the frock of silver lamé which she wore as the result of capitalist returns. Fred was meanly suspicious about her having really spent three-fifty on a book for him, and later he privily investigated. Sure enough; on the flyleaf there had previously been a pencilled name, now erased.

But from the blessed Annabel was an omnibus of Dorothy Sayers' detective stories, with the promise that for his next birthday he should have a set of Agatha Christie. 'Girl, you're walking out with the wrong generation of Cornplows,' he said, and he kissed her, Howard kissed her, and Hazel, who had watched all this foolishness without applause, kissed her with an entirely different accent.

The dinner was lush but difficult.

The extra maid, brought in temporarily for waiting on table, had been trained in a laundry, so that while she was warm and quick, she did rather slop things, and things you would not have expected to be slopped: not only the soup and champagne, but the currant jelly and the ice cream. Sara, the socialist, was testy with her, as Sara always was with waiters, taxi-drivers and telephone girls. Hazel was bland and forgiving, but then, Sara sniffed, Hazel was still afraid of servants.

With the hors d'oeuvres which Fred called the 'duffers'--there were anchovies and sardines and two kinds of potato salad--they all asked with considerable politeness about the progress of the Duplex Trailer and happily turned to boasting of their own troubles: Howard's fascinating troubles with the Truxon proctor who disliked the melodies of a mouth organ at two a.m.; Sara's troubles with finding a 'half-way human' hairdresser in Sachem; Doc Kamerkink's troubles with a scoundrel who had developed a coronary thrombosis on the day when he had promised to pay his bill.

With the mushroom soup, Howard talked about the probability of his being student commandant of the Truxon R.O.T.C. next year, while Sara informed them that in Russia, though under the Tsar music and dancing had been unknown, the peasantry now spent practically every moment from five p.m. to eight next day in dancing by moonlight.

But with the duck, and continuing through the ice cream and chocolate sauce, Howard really got under way, and every moment, as he became more exhilarated, Miss Annabel Staybridge looked at him more proudly. The glances she telegraphed to Fred indicated that she was not deceived; she considered Howard a good deal of a baby, but adored him nevertheless.

It was a little hard for the others, particularly the Kamerkinks, to understand just what it was that Howard expected to do.

It seemed that he was going to remain in college, thwart his enemies and play in the college football team; yet simultaneously march out of college and do something thrilling and lucrative with rockets, which, he rejoiced, were shortly to replace gasoline motors for flying, and propel a plane from New York to London in five hours. At the same time, apparently, he was going to start a cabaret near Truxon. All he needed was a few thousand dollars--and in the bright buoyancy of youth, he beamed at Fred, who flinched.

'Cal Tillery's cousin, that's who Howard is,' thought Fred.

With the apricot brandy, a drink which Fred considered related to pink silk underwear and rose-tipped cigarettes, Howard had managed to bring off an entirely new victory. Apparently he was now with the Triumph-Houndtooth-Duplex agency, as assistant and future successor to Fred, and was making things not merely hum but yell.

'You've certainly done a grand job, Dad, but there's a lot of new ideas that would quadruple the racket. Pretty soon, I think, we could add television sales to our other junk, and say, I've got some real ideas about the kind of showroom we ought to have--knock the eyes out of every other dealer in town--place right on Chester Avenue, all black glass and mirrors and red leather upholstery, and maybe a private bar for the big shots, and we could keep open evenings in summer and have an orchestra.'

Fred saw, instantly, that so insane is the world that Howard's hysterical plans for the Triumph agency might actually succeed. They really might 'quadruple the racket', and quadruple his work; and if that happened, he wanted to be out of it, hiding in a haystack.

He recalled that for more than thirty years he had been slapping almost unslappable backs, taking buyers to cafés when he had longed for his slippers, enduring more talk about the weather than there had been weather. He saw that it had been with the tension of a crusade that he had engaged himself in loving like a brother anybody who had $1100 for a car. He was suddenly and inexplicably weary. It would be a pleasure to refuse ever to sell anything else to anybody.

'Certainly, Mr. Jones, we have five million television sets, 1943 model, on hand, and I wouldn't sell you one for five million dollars! I don't like your split infinitives!'

Fred heard himself saying, but not in the least believing, 'You better get busy and learn something about motor engineering, Howard, if you're going into my firm, because pretty soon I'm going to sell it and retire.'

The entire company, who had hardened into the affable boredom suitable to a birthday party, sat up.

'You're going . . .'

'You're going . . .'

'To retire?'

'Nonsense!'

'You?'

'When?'

Fred enjoyed it. He had not been so important in his family since he had bought his opera hat. It pleased his vanity to see that his reputation for Being Different was so solid that he had taken in all of them, except perhaps Hazel, and that even she was wondering a little.

'And when would you pull this big hermit-and-monastery act?' Dr. Kamerkink demanded.

'One year from now.'

Howard bleated, 'Dad! You couldn't possibly! Whether I stick it out in college or not, I've got to get started, somehow, and you're the only one that'll help me!'

But it was Annabel's eyes that most pleaded for Howard.

'Good Lord, son, I expect to help you get started. But only started. I don't expect to carry you for years and years, like a lot of parents are doing, nowadays. I guess that's another demand the Youth Movement is making on Congress--let the old folks do it--penalize the folks that like to work by making 'em support the ones that don't.'

Hazel, rather sharply for Hazel: 'Don't tease him, Fred.'

'Me? I'm not teasing.' And Fred wondered if he really had been only teasing.

Howard, shocked at the threat to his one sure lifelong profession, was begging, 'But Dad, if you retired in ten-fifteen years from now, when I had things going . . .'

'No. One year. You can go to work and learn the motor car business from Paul Popple.'

'But Dad, oh, Paul is O.K., but he isn't even a college man!'

It was Sara who cut through the argument; who killed the epigrams which Fred was trying to work out, to the effect that a couple of fellows named Washington and Lincoln and Henry Ford and Thomas Edison had got along without college. She explained, more affectionately than usual:

'Father, of course we know you don't mean it, but please don't dramatize yourself, like a child playing soldiers. You aren't one bit abused; you like the game of selling things to people who don't want them, and you like seeing us dependent on you and turning to you for everything.'

Fred winced.

'I think your Duplex Trailer is absurd; in the very worst taste, and too horribly inconvenient--like those covered wagons of the pioneers, that always seem so romantic, but they must have been beastly uncomfortable to ride in and impossible to sleep in. But I do believe the thing may make a lot of money, and so might these nuisances that Howard raves about: television and nasty airships with rockets in their tails. There'll be a lot of cash, and of course you want to get it while the getting's good!'

'Why, Sara, I thought you were so much against all this doggone capitalistic acquisition of wealth and everything!'

'If I had--if we had the money, I could do such splendid things for Protest & Progress and the Workers' International Cohesion, an organization which . . .'

'You mean the Coheeze?'

'I believe it is sometimes so called.'

Believe? reflected Fred. She knew doggone good and well it was so called. He had heard her so-calling it on the telephone, that evening.

She was continuing, in the benign manner of St. Patrick watching the last snake leave Ireland: 'I'm working with Eugene Silga every day now, making plans to start the "P. & P." Of course we're not communists, but we believe the Soviets must have a chance, and we want to expose the beastly libel that the Bolsheviks have ever liquidated one . . .'

'"Liquidate!" That mean "slaughter"?'

'. . . single person unless they were traitors and spies for Trotsky, and trying to wreck the people's state. What would you do, if you were Stalin?'

'Now how the devil do I know what I'd do if I were Stalin? I don't even know what I'd do if I were Max Schmeling or Mae West. I never claimed to be much good on deciding what other people ought to do.'

'And yet you're constantly deciding what Howard and Mother and I ought to do.'

'Ow. You win, girl.' For the first time since his confession of desertion, there were smiles at the table. 'But look here; you're crowding me. You're getting me away from the subject in hand--the fact that I am going to retire in one year, and your mother and I are going to enjoy ourselves. Anybody got any real objections?'

'Yes. I have,' said his wife.

'I don't suppose for a minute,' said Hazel, 'that you mean any of this, but what would you do with yourself if you did retire?'

'Prob'ly travel.'

'You remember our one big trip together? Didn't we see everything--Washington, Mount Vernon, Chicago, the Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon? But all I can recall is how sore our feet got.'

'Well, thunder, we went too fast. Day and a half in Washington! Too quick. Why, Washington's a darn interesting town. Worth maybe three days of anybody's time. I'd like to go to Europe, say, and really sit around.'

'Can't we sit around here? Just think, dear, how uncomfortable you'd be in a strange bed. Or having waiters carve the roast beef. No, no! You stay on the job and have the fun of working with Howard and seeing the business expand. You'll never retire! You don't want to. You want to see the children get along, and help 'em.'

'Of course. You'd be bored to death travelling,' shouted Howard.

Annabel now burst:

'Please excuse me--I'm a dreadful outsider--but why shouldn't Mr. Cornplow go off bumming if he wants to, after all these years? I think it would be swell if he went and sat under a palm tree and threw rocks at the whales! Instead of teaching you which part of a car the engine's in, Howard!'

All of them stared at her severely, all but Howard, who was bothered, and Fred, who did not see her at all.

For this moment, during a rather pointless talk at a rather pointless birthday party, was suddenly and appallingly the most important in his life.

Whether it was the addition of another year to his age, or the toothaching memory of the cousinly Tillerys' sponging, or Howard's picture of an expanded agency with Fred as leading lunatic, or Sara's explanation that he was useless except as a feeder for communism, or whether it was some hidden impatience that for years he had struggled against recognizing, he knew, in this half-second, and knew terrifyingly, that what he had said as jest was devastating truth. He perceived that he did want to retire and, with Hazel, try to discover what manner of man he was and might become . . . that he intended to retire . . . that he might even actually do it.

He looked puzzled. He coughed a little. He scratched his ear. He jiggled his watch chain. The table and the guests came back to him out of the mist. He informed himself that he had returned to his senses, that the retirement notion was fantastic and that no sane fella like himself could be so anarchistic as to do something merely because he wanted and intended to do it.

He was conscious that Howard was finishing what had, apparently, been a lengthy speech:

'. . . and in my opinion, if you care for it, Dad, I think you'd be making a big mistake. But I agree with Mother that you don't mean it. You couldn't possibly retire. In one year--impossible! Because, to be specific, as my history prof says, aside from coupla months travelling in Europe, what could you do?'

It was hard for Fred to outface their pity. He waggled his fingers while he fumbled and mumbled:

'Do? Oh. Do. There's a lot of things I could do. I've been a good salesman; I've helped spread mechanical conveniences among a lot of stubborn dumb-bells, and I'm glad of it. Sara thinks I've been a pedlar; I think I've been a missionary. But I'd hate to pass out thinking I couldn't do anything else. Do? Travel, like I said, and not just two months in Europe, either. Nosir! Study it thoroughly, every corner; take an entire year! And learn things, like languages and music. And this manual stuff, carpentry and fixing clocks--nice, clean, interesting work. Maybe wind up in the country and have a crossroads store and a small farm, just to have something to fuss with.'

Hazel was worried. Better than any of them she knew that Fred had possibilities of madness, and she said luringly, 'But, dear, you'd be bored, after the city and contacting all these different people--stimulus, you might say.'

'Think I get so much kick out of "contacts" with Bert Whizzle and Paul Popple--and Cal and Mac Tillery, the rubber-boot twins? High-class stimulus that is!'

'But we can't just consider ourselves in this life, Fred. After all, we have got a duty to our family and friends.'

'Duty! Duty! Duty!' Was this the conservative Fred Cornplow? 'I'm sick of hearing about duty. Duty of husbands to come home to their wives every night, when it would be better for everybody's temper if they stayed downtown and had a little poker and liquor with the boys! Duty of wives to stay home instead of going out to the movies, just because Pa has his slippers on! Duty of Howard and Sara here to pretend they think I went to college once, and read a book. Duty of Annabel and the Kamerkinks to pretend they're not embarrassed by this family's undressing in public . . .'

'Not at all,' said Dr. Kamerkink.

'Ought to hear the Staybridges,' said Annabel.

'Duty! I figger life would be a lot better for everybody if more folks did things because it was fun and not because it was their dumb duty! Remember what Chum Frink wrote:

'"Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime
If we nag the kids and neighbours
And look noble all the time!"'

'Duty!' said Fred.

'Horrid word,' said Annabel.

'Shut up, dearest,' said Howard.

'O.K.,' said Annabel.

As the Cornplows' family physician, Dr. Kamerkink must have known that there was no use in giving Fred any advice which Fred was not, beforehand, prepared to hear and pay for. But the Doc had recently begun a book which showed that the latest thing in medical practice--true, it was known to the ancient Greeks, but without the sparkling terms which now made it interesting--was to use psychiatry on the patients: not let an honest citizen develop cramps or colitis because, subconsciously, he didn't like his wife's new green dress. No. Change the dress. Or change the wife.

Unfortunately the Doc hadn't got far enough into the book to learn what, in detail, you did with psychic therapeutics, but he took a shot with what he had:

'Now, Fred, if you'll allow me to give you some advice both as your physician and old golfing companion . . . This idea of yours about retiring and going off and making yourself uncomfortable is just an incipient psychosis. Course, I advise you to cut down your smoking and drinking and eat at regular periods and get a lot of rest.'

'No!'

'Oh yes. I told you that before. But the thing to correct is your--uh--your conditioned reflexes.'

This time it was Annabel who jeered 'No!'--but softly, almost inoffensively, with lips puckered in Fred's direction.

'Just as important as these somatic corrections, however, is the mental hygiene, and in good old cart horses like you and me, Fred, that implies a steady carrying on of your normal occupation. Any man who retires from his natural work before he's finally carted off to the hospital is a sap! None of these high-class psychiatrists, that get a hundred bucks an hour for telling you what you already know, could beat me at advocating plenty of good, juicy vacations and hobbies. Why, I knew one insurance agent with dyspepsia who, on my humble advice, took up archery, with the result that his wife--I want you to listen to this carefully now, Fred; it's quite a sensational case, and I'd of written it up for the Journal of Psychiatry if I'd had the time--and the result was that his wife, who was about twenty years younger than he was and who he suspected of sneaking off to dances with younger men, began to join him in archery. . .'

'Archery? Shooting arrows? No! I won't shoot any arrows!'

'Well, she became his real pal. But appetite ticklers like that are just the opposite of retiring. Fellow's got to be an authority on one thing, and stick by it, if he's going to win people's respect. Suppose, say, you were on a steamer and . . .'

'Steamer to where?' demanded Annabel.

'Heavens! Steamer to anywhere! I'm just imagining a case.'

'Oh,' said Annabel.

Fred chuckled, and Dr. Kamerkink looked at both of them suspiciously as he struggled on:

'You're on this steamer, and somebody asks you, "Who's that guy?" Do you answer, "Why, he's the fellow that sang 'Trees' at the ship's concert," or "He's the one that knows the difference between Barbados and Haitian rum." No! What you answer is, "Him? He's the biggest manufacturer of automobile tops west of the Mississippi!" and the other fellow gets interested and says, "Is that a fact! Say, I've got an automobile top! I'd like to get acquainted with him." See how I mean, Fred?'

'I see,' said Fred.

Hadn't Doc Kamerkink been saying something about how to get along well on steamers? He'd like to get along on steamers, well or ill.

Sara finished it--Sara tore it.

'But of course if you ever did retire, actually you wouldn't stay away for more than a month, Father. Impossible!'

'How so?'

'You're too much a creature of habit. You've often laughed and told us about how fussy Grandpa Cornplow was: had to have the wastebasket or his footstool in exactly the same place, and carried on if anybody moved his ruler, which he never used, one inch from its proper place. And of course you're precisely like him!'

'Me? That've always made such fun of him . . .'

'Precisely! If the cleaning woman ever changes the order you always keep your toothbrushes in, you have three fits before breakfast. You're as fixed in your routine as if you were in a plaster cast, and you'd be chilly without it!'

'Wh-why--me--why, I'm known throughout the entire motor business as a lone wolf. Do just what I please . . .'

'But, darling, you're always pleased to do exactly the same thing at exactly the same second every day, and if you went travelling and had to change your habits, you'd go crazy. Please, Father, this isn't any criticism. Since you'd rather play cards than read anything new and discover what's going on in the world, it doesn't matter. Gives you a stability that, maybe, the rest of us do depend on, as you hinted--not awfully politely, I thought. But it does mean you'll never in the world be able to do anything different from selling Triumphs and coming home to hear Lowell Thomas on the radio.'

'Why--why . . .' said Fred.

'Isn't that just what I told you!' crowed Doc Kamerkink, who hadn't.

There was a certain listlessness, as the party broke up, in all of them except Howard and Annabel, who trotted off together.

'Routine? Fixed habits? Me?' raged Fred, as he drank a glass of sodium bicarbonate--remembering that it had been his father's habit, also, to think that after every company dinner he needed soda.

Hazel raised her eyes at him and dropped them, silent.

While he worried his undershirt off, even during the pleasure of scratching his back, he studied her, and sighed to himself, 'Hazel's the best woman I know.'

But, he fretted, she was fanatically devoted to possessions, to things. Perhaps she coddled her belongings just to keep from being bored to death, but still . . . She was the cave woman who desired a larger fire, a thicker bearskin, than the lady in the next-door den.

Almost the only jealousy that had ever spotted her life was a small, annoying envy of the possessions of others. In the cottage of her Utica father she had lived meagrely, with any new purchase, a new doormat, a fly net for the horse, a matter to be discussed by the family for days. Yet at fifty-three she believed that she would be miserable if she were deprived of her candle-wick bedspreads, the grand piano she had bought for Sara, her private jar of balsam-scented bath salts.

'You and I really could skip off together and have a handsome time, if you weren't so set on having things just so,' he sighed.

'Fred! If you ever really want to travel, or do anything else, anything at all, I'll always be right there with you. But we mustn't fool ourselves. I've always said it would be a great treat to see Europe, but honestly, we wouldn't be happy, trying to get along without our comforts. I suppose in London, or even in Paris, there's hotels modern as anything in Sachem, but how would you like to go back to sleeping on a horrible hard mattress, like you probably had as a boy? Cornhusks! You can say what you want to, but it's awfully important to have an advertised mattress.'

'If I liked the scenery, I wouldn't care if I slept on a board.'

'But you can't very well look at the scenery while you're sleeping.'

'Oh, you know what I mean.'

'And since when did you ever sleep on a board? Not since you were arrested for rioting in college!'

'Arrested? Me? You know doggone good and well I've never been arrested in my life--except maybe ten-twelve times for speeding, and that time when I was a kid and punched the fresh waiter . . . Say, there's a button off this clean shirt, and I was going to wear it to-morrow!'

'Put it there on the chair; I'll sew it on . . .'

'But I was going to wear it . . .'

'Oh, wear another one! And you know, it isn't just things, that we've got fixed up so nice now, as we want 'em. It's our children and friends--people you can trust and count on. Course it's pleasant to meet strangers, but you can't understand 'em and feel safe, not like with your own folks.'

'Oh--well--thunder--gee--I guess maybe you're right. Don't meet many fellows like Doc Kamerkink, or Walter Lindbeck--even if he is fifteen-sixteen years younger than me, but how he can play poker!' Fred smacked his head on the pillow, turned the pillow over and pulled the blanket up under his chin, 'And Annabel's a peach.'

'And Sara, of course.'

'Except when she says fool things like my being a slave of habit.'

Resolutely he flopped on the pillow again. A truce to all this chatter. He was a man of resolute action, and he was going to sleep. Yes, he'd never be able to get away; he had enough nerve to admit it, when he had taken a licking.

He lay awake watching the shadows move against the yellow window blinds and trying to remember where he had heard a phrase, meaningless to him and exciting and a little sad:

'We take the Golden Road to Samarkand.'

The morning after his birthday, he wondered what it was that had been plaguing his sleep--something confused and risky. He was aghast as he remembered that he had made threats about becoming a Kipling hero.

But slowly, as morning strength flowed into him, he rejoiced. Yes! They hadn't licked him! He would do it! He would see many golden roads beyond the walls of Samarkand . . . Incidentally, where the deuce was Samarkand?

It was a frowsy day, cold for mid-spring, with a meaningless drizzle that seemed more to rise from the sticky brown earth than to drop from the disapproving skies. The rain was as dreary as Sara's charge of last evening that he had been so imprisoned in ruts that he couldn't even look over the edges.

In his shaky zest for freedom, he tried to defy the thought of Sara, but he shrewdly watched himself during the routine of dressing; he really saw himself; and that is, for any man over thirty-five, no joyful sight before breakfast. He stood apart and spied on his own fussing. He noticed that always, on rising, he first looked at the still-sleeping Hazel, to see if she was really there and still alive. On chilly mornings he always completed the first layers of dressing in the warm bathroom. He discovered that he always--but invariably with the prickliest discomfort if he failed to follow the rite--hung his underclothes on the bathroom hooks in the same order, with some fidgety notion of its being easier thus to dress after his bath.

He noticed that, perhaps every morning for a good many years, he had daily protested, 'All nonsense, this daily bath business. As kids we only got bathed once a week, didn't we, and we didn't smell so bad, did we?'

He noticed that he always soaped his feet before soaping his knees, and that it was a struggle to reverse that order. He noticed that it maddened him to find that the maid had left his bottle of mouthwash on the window-sill instead of where, by all the ritual proprieties, it belonged--in the medicine chest, and not just stuck any old where in the medicine chest either, but put away nicely and correctly between the sodium bicarbonate and the aspirin.

Where it belongs? he queried, in rebellion against his own pattern. Who passed that law?

He discovered that he always closed his eyes when he brushed his teeth; furiously discovered that he had to close his eyes.

It was distressing to admit that Sara could be right. Then it was time to break the mould of his job and household and tricks of personal habit, do anything, go anywhere, before he was encased in the coffin of routine, a living dead man.

Yes, and he'd do it, too. Wasn't going to permit even the best of habits to be his master. Already, he exulted, as he drew on his coat and started downstairs, he was changing . . . and noticed then that he had, as on every morning these last twenty years, coughed a tiny and perfectly meaningless cough at the exact moment when he tucked his watch into his lower left-hand vest pocket . . . and that if he had inconceivably ever found the watch in any other pocket, he would have felt naked.

So, with his exultations quenched, he went down to breakfast, in the scarlet-and-canary-yellow 'nook' off the butler's pantry, and as he heard himself muttering to the maid, 'I'll have my coffee right with my porridge', he realized that he had said this once a day for decades . . . and realized that if the Morning Recorder had not been there, exactly where it 'belonged', six inches to the right of his water glass, he would have felt himself betrayed by his nearest and dearest.

'Looks like I've gotten in such a habit I simply can't start the day without coffee and the baseball news. I better get out of this quick.'

It was rather too bad, because for years he had enjoyed his anecdotes about how ludicrously punctual his father had always been. 'Yessir, neighbours used to set their clocks by him. Made it kind of hard for a wild bunch like us young uns!' . . . How many times, for how many years, had he been saying that? he wondered.

Hazel, as always--and he now perceived that she had her own rigidities of habit--came down to breakfast as he was finishing. She was, as always, drowsily apologetic for being late, but she was so downy, so soft in her grey-and-crimson négligé, so like a robin with ruffled feathers, that her comfortableness reassured him. He would achieve freedom, yes; but no concept of freedom that did not include the presence of Hazel was imaginable. He was as married as a cooing dove or an Anglican bishop. Once or twice in his cheery life he may have looked with approval upon a cigar-store wench or a grass-widow customer, but he had never wanted to live on either cream puffs or caviare; and he knew that he would be for ever hungry without the honest bread and butter of Hazel.

'Well, still like to maybe travel a little?' he said.