“Miss Kimlock says it’s a dirty job. That’s what she told me. She told me they hadn’t caught any Communists anyway. It’s just for publicity, that’s what she told me,” Ellen said quite belligerently.

Cook, unperturbed, chuckled. “She’s agin the government. Always has been. You’d think she came from the old country the way she carries on against them all——”

“And a good thing too,” Ellen said, quite hot. “There’s nothing wrong with the old country.”

“Now, now, I didn’t say there was, did I?” and cook chuckled again, her arms deep in soapsuds. “Well, we’d best get on with it now, Ellen, if we’re to get through and see it all on the television. She’s set on our doing that, you know, told me five times if she told me once that she intends for us to watch it.”

Ellen sighed as she took a bunch of silver up into her towel.

“What’s the matter now?”

“I was thinking of Horace. I never thought I’d miss that old cat the way I do, throwing up good haddock the way he did, turning up his nose at anything you’d cook for him. It’s a strange thing the way he used to sit outside the door just waiting like a saint, never a mew out of him.”

“Times have changed,” cook said gruffly, “we’ve seen a lot come and go these last years. It’s a sad business altogether.”

Yet in the general gloom which the kitchen reflected there were points of light. In the last years Grace had got very fond of Pen and George, safely married at last when George got his assistant professorship. The way George dropped in when he was tired after a day of conferences with students was almost like Edward. But he was gentler than Edward, a great asker of questions; Grace found herself digging out old scrapbooks about the Anarchists, telling George about Sacco and Vanzetti, reliving it all for him, and especially lately when he was bothered, so he said, by the extreme conservatism of his students. “I want some ammunition, Grace,” he’d say, with a twinkle in his eye. “What was that Holmes dissent you mentioned the other day?” And Grace would smile. “That’s the kind of thing I used to dig up to give to my professors. It seems queer you should want it for your students. Do you suppose they’ll all grow up to be fierce old radicals in their eighties?”