‘The data,’ chirped Annabel, sitting on a pile of ‘Proletarian Art’.

Howard faced her crossly. ‘Well, what about it? Don’t YOU think you gotta have the data, Bell?’

‘Sure. Data is the goods.’

‘You’re so frivolous all the time! You got no idea the risks I take, in a conservative dump like Truxon, coming right out for the left wing. Are you with me or aren’t you?’

‘I’m with you, beautiful, just the same as your mother will be with your father, no matter how much she may kick beforehand, if he ever decides to go and do something sweet and crazy.’

Sara and Howard swapped glances of surprise. It had not occurred to them that anybody, certainly not a flippant young woman, certainly not a superior Staybridge, could speak of their matter-of-fact parents with enthusiastic affection.

‘Howard!’ Sara demanded. ‘Tell me something more about rockets for aerial power. Just exactly how do they work, mechanically?’

‘Rockets?’

‘Good heavens, don’t you remember that the other day you were making a fortune out of them? Come through now; don’t hold out all this priceless information on your comrade and sister, stupid. How do the rockets work? I’ve got to write something about ’em.’

Annabel was helpful: ‘The aviator wears an opera hat with the rockets in ’em, and every time he shuts the thing, a rocket goes off.’

‘Can it!’ said Howard.

‘Don’t be an idiot,’ said Sara.

‘Darling!’ said Gene.

‘Check,’ said Annabel.

‘Now rockets,’ said Howard, ‘these rockets — well, if you want a technical explanation, they’re affixed to the, I think it’s the rear of the fuselage, I think it’s the fuselage, and — well, they go off, and the sum of the reaction is equal to the reaction, I mean to the action, and there you are, Sara, can’t you see? If you’d only studied physics, instead of all this literature and stuff!’

‘My beautiful,’ yearned Annabel.

Winnie Weston Blear’s Tea Room was to Sachem Falls a combination of all the Greenwich Village restaurants that begin with Ye and all the Broadway restaurants in which legitimate theatrical producers have a farewell drink before catching the train for Hollywood. Mrs. Blear’s establishment had caviare once or twice a year, you could get slivovitz if you knew the head waitress, and English muffins were practically obligatory. Here exhibited themselves the featured players of the Spreadeagle Little Theatre, all the violin teachers in town, and the local literary celebrity — the dramatic critic on the Evening Tidings, who had written a book on his travels in New Zealand.

Guy took all of the ‘P. & P.’ conspirators, except Gene, who had a rendezvous with the telephone, over to Mrs. Blear’s and went cosmopolitan on them. His father, the bleak Mr. Putnam Staybridge, had once suffered Guy’s presence for two weeks in London and one in Paris, and Guy explained now, to the untravelled Howard and Sara and Annabel, how sophisticated were cream cheese with bar le duc, avocado soaked with curaçao, and Stilton with port — while the nearest they came to these elegances was cinnamon toast with chilly tea.