Oh yes, even with her dark Dianic power, that was the most that Sara could do to them: take away all their joy in the adventure; make the still nights they had known, and the placid days, the sight of distant valleys and their sharing of renewed love seem the vain calf sickness of a premature senility. That was all she could do, but such as it was, she accomplished it with the skill she had learned in her diversified training as outlaw communist and polite tennis star.

So Fred and Hazel went back into captivity.

A week after their return to Sachem, Fred applied for their passports. When, or whether, they would ever be used, he did not know.

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

The Prodigal Parents, by Sinclair Lewis

Chapter 27

The autumn, no very great season in the selling of motor cars, had become lively with the sale of trailers in which those citizens of Sachem Falls who had retired from the economic struggle, because they had too much money or too little, planned to go to Florida or California for winter. The Duplex had been booming all summer, but in September, Fred’s treacherous rivals, the Conqueror Motor Company, dealt the Duplex a nasty blow with its announcement of the Allover Caravan.

The Allover was not a trailer, but built like a bus, with the motor contained in the body. It burst on Sachem with full-page newspaper advertisements which asserted convincingly that the Allover was easier to drive, easier to park, and much easier to handle in passing other cars. As a minor virtue, in this war of transportation with its almost theological disputation, the Allover’s furnishings could readily be removed, turning it into a truck.

A sound commercial warrior like Fred would have hated any opposition at all which took money away from him, but in this particular attack, he persuaded himself, there was something malign, for Putnam Staybridge, putative father to Annabel, was known to be part owner of the Conqueror company. And, Fred complained, hadn’t he gone and made a fool of himself and thought the Cornplows and the Staybridges were getting on to better terms? For the good Putnam had invited Howard and Annabel for a week at his Adirondack cabin, and Sara for a week-end . . . Everybody except the persons concerned seemed to feel that Fred and Hazel had already had as much vacation as was good for them.

The day after the Allover advertisements appeared, Staybridge invited Fred to call upon him, at the general offices of the Liberty Bell Clock Company. ‘Hell with him; let him come here and call on me; I won’t go a step,’ growled Fred, as he reached for his hat.

Staybridge’s office, with its large mahogany table for the directors and the small polished desk for the president, looked like a Colonial dining-room. You could almost smell boiled codfish.

Staybridge was cautiously cordial in his ‘How do’.