Annabel paid attention to her brother not with her ears but with her memory. For years she had listened to her father and Guy being airy about European food, and that may explain why she looked so fondly on a Howard who confessed that he knew no more about Stilton (which he seemed to regard as some variety of sponge cake) than a rabbit. Howard warmed handsomely to her stilly gaze, and suddenly, to the disgust of those hard-boiled communist warriors, Sara and Guy, he demanded of Annabel:

‘Are you crazy about me?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘How crazy?’

‘Catatonics, catelepsies and cataclysms.’

Sara barked, ‘I’m going to the office.’

‘And me,’ said Guy. ‘When do you publish my poem?’

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https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/lewis/sinclair/prodigal/chapter14.html

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

The Prodigal Parents, by Sinclair Lewis

Chapter 15

While Fred, with Hazel on the arm of his chair, was reading the first copy of Protest & Progress, Sara pretended to be lost in the Daily Worker, and over it she watched them with what she hoped was cynical amusement.

On the ‘P. & P.’ cover, in a technique familiar to Fred from the high-school papers his children had once brought home, was a caricature labelled ‘A Dictator of the Auto Industry’, depicting a grossly fat man drinking champagne from a magnum. That was fairly easy for Hazel to understand, but she balked at two other caricatures, ‘Workers Unite!’ and ‘The Newest Deal’. In the first, ‘Labour’ was revealed as an agonized dwarf lashed by a diabolic monster named ‘Capital’, but in the second Labour was a young and singing giant who laughed at a wizened Capital held in the palm of his brawny hand: a hand worthy of a structural steel worker or even of Litvinoff.

Hazel worried, ‘Look, Fred, I don’t get that. If Labour is such a shrimp in one place and gets all beat up by Capital, how come he can squeeze Capital so, two pages farther on?’

‘Hush, Hazel. That shows how fast the Coheeze is working. Don’t be bourjoyce.’

Sara sniffed.

The bourjoyces studied, then, the ‘P. & P.‘s’ news from Russia.

With only nineteen years since the revolution, it appeared, the Soviets had built factories, railroads, playgrounds and a twelve-story hotel.

‘Hm. Pretty good. Still, that’s the same period as from 1865 to 1884, when America built up the entire West, after having had the stuffin’s knocked out of her in the Civil War,’ said Fred.

To his delight, that did draw Sara. ‘Entirely different,’ she proclaimed. ‘How?’ said Fred. ‘Any number of ways,’ said Sara.

He was not so well pleased when he read Eugene Silga’s interview with the executive vice-president of the Colonial Motor Car Company, which presented the executive as a languider, pouchier and more mulish version of George III, ignorant alike of motor engineering and of the living conditions of the workers. This demon Fred had met in Detroit; he knew that he was the son of a blacksmith, an engineer who was equally interested in rear-end motors, in mountain climbing and in hospitals. ‘We are not amused,’ felt Fred.