But he persisted. He had worked out for himself a principle: ‘You’ll never make any change in your life that you haven’t already begun.’

A fortnight after the beginning of Fred’s madness, Howard appeared in the office and croaked, ‘Of course all those jokes you pulled at your birthday party about retiring — I know you’re too responsible to do anything like that.’

‘Well, YOU know, son — fellow sometimes feels like kicking the dashboard.’

‘Sure. I didn’t take you seriously.’

‘No? Well . . . Gosh it’s hot for May.’ Indeed, Fred was wiping his forehead.

‘Sure is. Yessir, actually hot!’

‘Guess I’ll drop in at Swazey & Lindbeck’s, this noon, and pick me out a summer suit.’

‘No, no.’ Howard was pretty firm. ‘They’ll sting you. Go to the Gotham Mart.’

‘You think so?’

‘I know it. And I don’t want you to stop carrying a silk muffler yet. Pretty fickle weather.’

‘Yuh, I suppose . . . Though I bet your mother is sweating to death, this morning, laying out her sweet peas.’

‘And that’s another thing. I’ve told Mother and I’ve told her, but I just can’t get her to listen to me. It’s all foolishness, her trying to grow sweet peas. Why don’t she put in some good sturdy rose bushes that don’t need so much attention? But think she’d pay any attention to me? Oh no!’

When Howard was gone, to drive back to Truxon College at a conservative sixty miles an hour, Fred mused, ‘So if the young man should make good, and not always lean on me, fifteen years from now he’d be tying up Hazel and me by the fireplace and telling us when to breathe. Nothing doing! He travels the fastest who travels alone . . . Always providing, of course, he has Hazel with him, you understand.’

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Last updated Sunday, March 27, 2016 at 11:57

The Prodigal Parents, by Sinclair Lewis

Chapter 14

No doubt Sara and Eugene Silga didn’t deserve any particular credit for it.

Their office was one stingy room on the third floor of the Stiggis Building, between a photographer of riotous babies and the agency for a platinum mine. They had nothing but two kitchen tables, four kitchen chairs, a wire basket filled with bills, a pile of rival radical magazines which damned one another for luke-warmness in revolution, one window — dirty; and a telephone — in arrears, but no doubt they enjoyed it more than a plush and walnut office with respectful attendants. You can feel more heroic in shirt-sleeves than in ermine.

In this primitive office of the Sachem Falls Cell of the Workers’ International Cohesion, and of Protest & Progress, Sara was luxuriously misreading proof on the forthcoming first number, while Gene sputtered on the telephone:

‘Why, certainly, comrade, we’ll provide the speakers . . . Good? Listen! One of ’em’s been beaten by the gorillas seven times . . . Sure, all the decorations; I’ve got a four-by-seven-foot poster of Lenin . . . No. Fifty per cent of the gate . . . No, won’t touch it for less . . . All right, you talk to ’em and give me a ring.’