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.’