‘There was something funny about this accident,’ said the chief darkly and returned to his bezique, after a telephone call.

For a week, not one Allover Caravan was sold. This fact Fred conveyed to Hazel, who protested:

‘Why, you absolute pirate! I thought you’d reformed!’

‘Look here! I tried to reform. I tried to go off on a pilgrimage and become a better and tenderer man, and my two brats objected. Can I help it?’

Mr. Putnam Staybridge telephoned to Mr. Frederick Cornplow:

‘Uh, I thought you might just possibly be interested to know that the Conqueror agency, or so I am informed, intend to reduce their advertising for Allover Caravans to, uh, to approximately the same space used for Duplexes.’

‘Thanks,’ said Fred. He removed the show trailer, and McKuffee’s wreck vanished. But he learned later, all his kindness could not stir up a proper sale of Allovers.

Hazel sighed, ‘Well, now you’ve had another big success, I suppose you’ve got your teeth in it so firm that you and I’ll never be running off together again.’

‘You mean it? You’d like to?’

‘I THINK so.’

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

The Prodigal Parents, by Sinclair Lewis

Chapter 28

The scene was, for Fred, too fragile and artificial for comfort, yet he admired its gaiety: the club tennis courts, the white cement, the green balls flying, and the young people in white, young men with blue and crimson scarves above white shirts, girls with white shorts and honey-coloured legs, all against hills flamboyant with late September. He particularly liked the tall umpire’s chair, now empty. To be perched up there, above the conflict yet close to it and dominating it, would be kingly, he explained to Walter Lindbeck.

‘Awful. I knew a fellow got a tennis ball in his eye just when Fred Perry was smacking the hands across the sea,’ argued Walter.

Mr. Walter Lindbeck, junior partner by inheritance of the large department store of Swazey & Lindbeck, was fifteen or sixteen years younger than Fred, but he had by chance, on a fishing trip, become one of Fred’s intimates. Though he had gone to a large university and spent a year abroad in fruitfully doing nothing, Walter had, in Sachem, the high moral rank of: ‘Steady but progressive; a fine, conservative, forward-looking young fella, and got no bad habits even if he is a bachelor.’ He belonged to a chess club, but he also rode horseback; he went annually to New York City for the grand opera, but it was said that at the S. & L. Employees’ Association he played pool with the elevator men and packers. Altogether, a high type of the youngish captain of commerce, though Sara sniffed that with a man like Mr. Lindbeck, whose thin face, and a black moustache small and neat as a cigarette, looked poetic, it ‘made her tired’ to see him interested only in sales leaders and invoices.