d brother." He gestured toward the house.
"Old Flapdoodle, in there, he's a rabid red these days. Got tired of
being a patriot. Worked hard for a year trying to prove that Vielhaber
was a German spy, flapping his curtain at night to the German Foreign
Office. But no one paid any attention to him except a few other
flapdoodles, so then he began to read your brother's precious words, and
now he's a violent comrade. Fact! expecting any day that the workers
will take things over and he'll come into money--money the interests
have kept him out of. He kind of licks his chops when he talks about it.
Never heard him talk about his wife's share, though. Say, that brother
of yours is making a plumb fool of himself!"

"He didn't understand."

"No--and he doesn't yet."

"Where is he now?"

"Oh"--Dave circled a weary hand to the zenith--"off somewhere
holy-rolling. Gets his name in the papers--young poet radical that
abandoned life of luxury to starve with toiling comrades. Say, do you
know what a toiling comrade gets per day now? No matter. Your brother
hasn't toiled any. Makes red-hot speeches. That Whipple bunch reared at
last and shut off his magazine money, so he said he couldn't take
another cent wrung from the anguished sweat of serfs. But it ain't his
hands he toils with, and he ain't a real one, either. Plenty of real
ones in his bunch that would stand the gaff, but not him. He's a shine.
Of course they're useful, these reds. Keep things stirred up--human
yeast cakes, only they get to thinking they're the dough, too. That
brother of yours knows all the lines; says 'em hot, too, but that's only
so he'll get more notice. Say, tell us about the war.

"It was an awful big one," said his son.

* * * * *

Soon after a novel breakfast the following morning--in that it was late
and leisurely and he ate from a chair at a table--he heard the squealing
brakes of a motor car and saw one brought to a difficult stop at the
Penniman gate. Sharon Whipple, the driver, turned to look back at the
machine indignantly, as if it had misbehaved. Wilbur Cowan met him at
the gate.

It became Sharon's pretense that he was not hugging the boy, merely
feeling the muscles in his shoulders and back to see if he were as good
a lightweight as ever. He pounded and thumped and punched and even made
as if to wrestle with the returned soldier, laughing awkwardly through
it; but his florid face had paled with the excite