Perhaps next would come, perhaps there was already coming, secret and dangerous, the Revolt of the Men; they would admit how sick they were of the soft and scented cushions of women, of women’s nervous reminders that pipe ashes didn’t belong on the floor; perhaps they would go off to monasteries and fishing camps (much the same thing) and leave their wives and children flat.

If the institution of The Family was to survive at all, if it possibly could survive, parents would have to stop expecting children to accept their ideas (but that was a warning even older than Bernard Shaw). Men and women must expect nothing, nothing whatever, from each other as of vested right (but that was an ancient battle, too, though still as little won as when Ibsen was new and shocking). But beginning about 1914, and each year since then more violent, there was a growing revolt of parents against the growing revolt of Youth; a demand that the young Saras and Howards should regard their parents’ houses as something more than places in which to change clothes before dashing off in motor cars (dressing-rooms, clothes and cars all provided free, by the courtesy of the management) to places more interesting.

But Fred didn’t at all advocate the Fascist–Nazi-Bolshevik system, the naively new and wearisomely antiquated system of belief that everybody ought to sacrifice himself for everybody else. He had the opposite faith: that nobody ought to expect any sacrifice from anybody else, and that (in merely another ten thousand years or so, if the luck and weather held good) thus might be ended for ever the old structure, equally practised by small circles of relatives and by monstrously great nations, whereby A sacrificed his honest desires on behalf of B, and B sacrificed for C, and C sacrificed himself violently but complainingly, all day long, for A, and everybody resented the whole business and chanted, ‘How loyal and unselfish we all are — curse it!’

The sight of the Statue of Liberty was not his chief thrill on arriving in New York, but rather his first American ‘cuppacoffee, slabapie, à la mode, please, Sister.’

When he trudged out of the railroad station in Sachem, he was astonished to see that after this lifetime of five months, in which the entire world had been changed, Harriman Square seemed exactly the same. Apparently the cigar stores had unfeelingly gone on selling cigars without his aid; and the familiar corner loafers looked at him without interest.

He had telegraphed to Sara — Mrs. Walter Lindbeck — but not to Howard.

He went up the sandstone steps of what had been his home. But his tread sounded different on the stones; the doorbell sounded different and unwelcoming; and the door was opened by a strange maid who, when he sighed, ‘Is Mrs. Lindbeck in? — I’m Mr. Cornplow,’ snapped at him, ‘Whajah say your name was?’

In the hallway a new and echoing mirror had replaced the reproduction of Whistlers’ ‘Mother’.