‘“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.