‘Dad, I don’t want to take it. You’ve already given us enough furniture to scrape along on. I’d rather save, and buy things bit by bit. Howard is sweet, but . . .’

‘Doggone it, Annabel, will you stop being so doggone noble? I’m being noble and you’re being noble and no wonder Howard goes haywire with everybody forgiving him the whole doggone time, doggone it! Here, you take this thousand bucks and sign this note and get out of here and go buy that furniture, do you hear?’

‘O.K., Chief!’

From the sketchiness of the lounge chairs, the couch, the occasional tables, the dressing-table and bureau that she bought, Fred suspected that Annabel had thriftily kept half of the thousand. He came in for coffee or lunch once or twice a week; he found that, as she often asserted, Putnam Staybridge had taught her perfection in making soups and desserts, canapés and salads. But she had never learned to cook roast beef or bread pudding or porridge, she was not precise in bed-making, and she belonged to the school of sweepers who leave rolls of dust under the bureau. She did perceive the sloppiness of her housekeeping, and day after day he saw her trying to remember where she had put the ice pick, trying to clean the ash trays and the glasses which their friends had left on every chair and table at last night’s party.

He sighed, ‘Dunno how come, but I feel more at home eating sinkers and lukewarm coffee off a soap-box with Annabel than I would having a bottle of champagne with Sara.’

(There were, to him, only five types of wine: champagne wine, sherry wine, red wine, California wine and cowslip wine, of which, as he understood it, only the first was to be drunk for pleasure and not to flatter one’s host.)

The third issue of Protest & Progress contained two articles which irritated Fred beyond tolerance. He read them on an evening when Sara was away and, despite the sweet vision of sleep, he stayed up, girt for battle.

The first article stated that rarely had there been so persuasive a proof that all Americans were fools as had been seen during the recent visit of General Kynok, of the Soviet Air Corps. Aside from being entertained by the American airmen, invited to lunch by the President, urged to lecture in several cities, and shown all our landing fields and aeroplane factories, he had been ignored.

This curtain lecture was accompanied by a few sound generalizations: (1) It is glorious for a Russian to be a soldier and ready to defend his country. (2) Any American who is ready to defend his country and has become a soldier is either a bloodthirsty fiend or has been misled by the paid hypnotizers of Capitalism. (3) The Russian air fleet is stronger than those of any other three countries combined. (4) America, if she had any sort of nice feeling, would be devoting herself to helping defenceless and aeroplaneless Russia. (5) General Kynok was at once a Wellingtonian commander and a true-blue, tail-wagging Proletarian comrade.