‘That sounds better.’

‘And I’m afraid I’ll have to contribute to the courts fund and my allowance is so shamefully overdrawn . . .’

‘Ten dollars be enough? . . . No? . . . Fifteen? . . . No? Well, twenty-five, and that’s my limit!’

‘Oh, I suppose we can get away with that . . .’

‘“We”?’

‘But if the club were only the end of it! Here I’ve gone and got myself mixed up with the amateur summer theatre that the Spreadeagle Little Theatre is sponsoring, and they’ve elected me chairman of the Box Office, Seats, and Ushering Committee — of course it is quite an honour, with Mrs. Channing Pragg and Putnam Staybridge (and how HE ever came to have a tacky daughter like Annabel I don’t know; wait; don’t shoot; if Howard and you say she’s pretty, I suppose she must be)— and with them on the board of directors, it’s quite a social honour, and so of course I’ll have to try and raise a fifty — or seventy-five-dollar subscription, somehow or other . . .’

And Fred fired, after keeping his powder so dry so long:

‘I know I’m just a clodhopper, that’s all, nothing but a clodhopper, just a clown, that’s all, nothing but a dumb bunny, but I’ll be everlastingly doggoned if I can understand how you can hook up your doggoned Young Men’s Anarchist Association with guzzling tea with Sister Pragg and kissing the doggone snobs in the tennis association . . .’

‘Yes? Perhaps I might just happen to convert them to socialism.’

‘And perhaps you might just happen to not do anything of the kind. You look here, Sara: I’ve always given you all the allowance I thought I could afford, but now you’re proposing to support not only Holy Russia and Holy Joe Stalin but also the white-pants aggregation, and this amateur-dramatics-ina-barn . . .’

‘“Dramatics”!’

‘ . . . circus, that Sister Pragg would do anything for it except ever come through with a cent, I— well, I’m afraid you’ll have to get Comrade Silga to increase your salary — from about ten bucks a week minus to something plus — and then devote that to these children’s games.’

At the end of that scene, as he described it to Hazel in their bathroom, ‘She went and got hurt, and then she walked out on me. Oh, I don’t want to be mean, but I don’t like to see her — yes, or see me — falling for people that just use her for what they can get out of her,’ he worried, while Hazel, smoothing his cheek, was worried along with him.

He was the more dependent upon the security of home because he was too busy and doing too well. The Triumph and Houndtooth were prospering; the Duplex Trailer was a sensation; and he had to bounce all over his district, leasing out Duplex rights to sub-agents, and thus getting rid, wherever he could, of responsibility. That he also got rid thus of much of his profits he did not tell his family.