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America was going to be a land of absurdities for many years, and the Robbie Budds would

have endless opportunities to ridicule and denounce. But business would begin to pick up and

people would begin to eat again—and not just the Budds.

Lanny didn't have any trouble, for the French banks weren't closed, and he had money to

spare for his refugees. If Irma's income stayed in hock they could go back to Bienvenu—the

cyclone cellar, she called it. She had never had to earn any money in her life, so it was easy for

her to take her husband's debonair attitude to it. If she lost hers, everybody else would lose

theirs, and you wouldn't have any sense of inferiority. Really, it was rather exciting, and the

younger generation took it as a sporting proposition. Irma would swing between that attitude

and her dream of an august and distinguished salon; when Lanny pointed out to her the

inconsistency of the two attitudes she was content to laugh.

VI

Rick came over to spend a few days with them; he was no longer so poor that he had to worry

about a trip to Paris, and it was his business to meet all sorts of people and watch what was

going on. A lame ex-aviator who would some day become a baronet, and who meanwhile had

made a hit as a playwright, was a romantic figure, even though he was extreme in his talk. The

ladies were pleased with him, and Irma discovered that she had what she might call a home-

made lion; she would tell the smartest people how Lanny had been Rick's boyhood chum, had

taken him to conferences all over Europe and helped to plan and even revise his plays; also

how she, Irma, had helped to finance The Dress-Suit Bribe, and was not merely getting her

money back but a considerable profit. It was the first investment that had been her very own,

and she could be excused for being proud of it, and for boasting about it to her mother and her

several uncles.

Irma decided more and more that she liked the English attitude to life. Englishmen felt

intensely, as you soon found out, but they were content to state their position quietly, and even

to understate it; they didn't raise their voices like so many Americans, or gesticulate like the

French, or bluster like the Germans. They had been in the business of governing for a long

time, and rather took it for granted; but at the same time they were willing to consider the

other fellow's point of view, and to work out some sort of compromise. Especially did that seem

to be the case with continental affairs, where they were trying so hard to mediate between the

French and the Germans. Denis de Bruyne said: "Vraiment, how generous they can be when

they are disposing of French interests!"

The Conference on Arms Limitation was still in session at Geneva, still wrangling, exposing

the unwillingness of any nation to trust any other, or to concede what might be to a rival

nation's advantage. Rick, the Socialist, said: "There isn't enough trade to go round, and they

can't agree how to divide it." Jesse Blackless, the Communist, said: "They are castaways on a

raft, and the food is giving out; they know that somebody has to be eaten, and who will

consent to be the first?"

There was a lot of private conferring between the British and the French, and British officials

were continually coming and going in Paris. Rick brought several of them to the palace for

tea and for dancing, and this was the sort of thing for which Irma had wanted the palace; she

felt that she was getting her money's worth—though of course she didn't use any such crude

phrase. Among those who came was that Lord Wickthorpe whom she had met in Geneva last

year. He had a post of some responsibility, and talked among insiders, as he counted Rick and

the Budds. Irma listened attentively, because, as a hostess, she had to say something and

wanted it to be right. Afterward she talked with Lanny, getting him to explain what she hadn't

understood. Incidentally she remarked: "I wish you could take a balanced view of things, the

way Wickthorpe does."

"Darling," he answered, "Wickthorpe is a member of the British aristocracy, and is here to

fight for the Empire. He's got pretty much of everything he wants, so naturally he can take

things easy."

"Haven't you got what you want, Lanny?"

"Not by a darn sight! I want a better life for masses of people who aren't in the British

Empire, and for many in the Empire whom Wickthorpe leaves out of his calculations."

"But, Lanny, you heard him say: 'We're all Socialists now.'"

"I know, dear; it's a formula. But they write their definition of the word, and it means that

Wickthorpe will do the governing, and decide what the workers are to get. The slum-dwellers

in the East End will go on paying tribute to the landlords, and the ryots in India and the

niggers in South Africa will be sweated to make luxury for British bondholders."

"Oh, dear!" exclaimed the would-be salonnière. "Who will want to come to see us if you talk

like that?"

VII

Lanny was interested in the point of view of these official persons, and sat in the splendid

library of his wife's rented home and listened to Rick discussing the Nazi movement with

Wickthorpe and his secretary, Reggie Catledge, who was also his cousin. It was a point of view

in no way novel to Lanny, his father having explained it when he was a very small boy. The

governing classes of Britain made it a fixed policy never to permit one nation to become

strong enough to dominate the Continent; regardless of which nation it might be, they would

set themselves the task of raising some rival as a counterweight.

Wickthorpe disliked the Nazis and what they were doing, but he didn't rave at them; he just

said they were a set of bounders. He took it for granted that their fantastic promises had been

made as a means of getting power. "Just politics," he said, and refused to be disturbed by the

possibility that the bounders might mean what they said. The two Englishmen listened with

interest to what Lanny had to tell about his meeting with Hitler, and asked him some

questions, but at the end they were of the same opinion still.

"We've had so many wild men in our public life," said his lordship. "You and I are too young

to remember how old John Burns used to rave in his speeches at Trafalgar Square, but my

parents got up slumming parties to go and listen. Long afterward you could meet the old boy

in the New Reform Club and hear him talk about it—in fact you could hardly get him to talk

about anything else."

"He was a very strict teetotaler, but his face was as red as a turkey- cock's wattles," added

Catledge.

"Hitler doesn't drink, either," said Lanny; but the others didn't appear to attach any

importance to that.

They went on to point out to Rick that the French imperialists were arrogant, and their

diplomats had made a lot of trouble in Syria, Iraq, and other places. French bankers had a

great store of gold, and made use of it in ways inconvenient to their rivals. Wickthorpe didn't

say that Hitler would serve to keep the French occupied, but his arguments made plain the

general idea that you couldn't entrust any one set of foreigners with too much power. It was

even possible to guess that he wasn't too heartbroken over what had happened in Wall Street

during the past four years; because a large part of Britain's prosperity depended upon her

service as clearinghouse for international transactions, and it had been highly embarrassing to