That essay was merely an appetizer for the article in which Gene Silga urged that the Pragg Glassworks, the largest industry in Sachem Falls, be organized forthwith as a closed shop, and since it had been successful in resisting organization, that this be done by violence. He advised the workers to buy rifles, to form classes in marksmanship, to study Georges Sorel.

Fred was raving, when Sara appeared, after midnight.

‘Wait a minute,’ she said crisply. ‘You’re just an amateur scold. Look what the professionals have done.’

She gave him an early edition of the Sachem Falls Recorder, the morning paper, open at the third page. The right-hand column was filled with a story headed: ‘Mayor and Council Denounce Local Red’, which announced that one Eugene Silga was a notorious Bolshevik, that his paper was inciting to riot, and that the Board of Aldermen, with the mayor in attendance, would take up, tomorrow, means of ridding the city of Silga and his followers.

‘You better get out of town!’ agonized Fred.

‘No. I can’t run away.’

‘Yes. That’s so. You oughtn’t to. But I certainly think you ought to stay away from Gene and your office a few days.’

‘I suppose you’re ashamed of me! Perhaps it’s Mother and you that will want to run away!’

Mildly, rather surprised: ‘No — no. I don’t have to tell you I don’t like what “P. & P.” is doing — trying to make the whole country a WPA with unemployability the only test of employability. But of course I want to help you any way I can . . .’

‘There is one thing you can do: help straighten up the office accounts. With this beastly attack, I expect all our beastly creditors will be surging into the office tomorrow, clamouring to be paid.’

‘They might be. Some business men do like to be paid! I’ll step around in the morning.’

‘If you’d care to,’ she said indifferently, as she started up stairs.

Fred’s splendid rage had gone damp. Once more he had discovered that even when you have a sinner exactly where you want him, he still may have something to say; that it is, perhaps, a mistake to rehearse a play without inquiring whether your opposite is going to have some lines also.

He did not long brood on his failure. He knew that his daughter, beneath her icing, must be disheartened. He paddled to the upper hall and, after she should have been asleep, heard her softly thumping about her room. He longed to go in and have what he called a ‘real talk with her’. Suddenly, feeling lonely, he saw that not for years had Sara and he talked with easy simplicity. This Coheeze disaster might be a bridge between them.

Did children, afraid to ask their parents for favours, know how often those parents were afraid of seeming ridiculous or bossy, and how they hovered, hesitating, outside bedroom doors?

He knocked.

There was no hearty ‘Come in’. Sara evidently burrowed around for a dressing-gown before she opened the door, with an annoyed ‘Yes?’