I
commenced to act.

"Ma, are you going to keep up this Bolshevist bull?" I says.

"I am!" she says. "You told me to do something modern and I'm doing the
very modernest thing there is!"

"You are going to be wrong on that by this P. M.," I says, "or to-morrow
at latest," I says, "because there is or aught to be something moderner,
and that is United Americanism!" I says. "And since the only way to
fight fire is with it, I am going to start a rival organization and
start it quick!" I says, "and I'm going to do it on a sounder basis than
your people ever dreamed of because we'll all talk English so's we'll
each of us know what the organization is about!"

"Why Marie La Tour!" says Ma, which it's a fact she only calls me that
when she's sore at me. "Why, Marie La Tour, what is your organization
going to do?"

"I don't know yet beyond one thing," I says, "we are going to _get
together_ and keep together!"

And so, without waiting for a come-back or any embarrassing questions, I
hustled into a simple little grey satin Trotteur costume which is French
for pony-clothes and left that homefull of heavy-weight traitors where a
radical parrot yelled "Anarchy" from morning till night, and even the
steam radiators had commenced to smell like dynimite. And having shut
the door after me with quite some explosion myself, I had the limousine
headed to the White Kittens Annual Ball Assn., which I was due at it on
account of all the most prominent ladies in picture and theatrical
circles being on the committee and I naturally being indespensible if
only for the value of my name. So I started off but not before I noticed
that the same plain-clothes John was again perched opposite my front
door.

III

ALL the way to the Palatial Hotel which the meeting is always held in
the grand ballroom of, I kept getting more and more worked up. Things
had certainly gone too far when Bolshevism had spread from the parlor to
the kitchen or visa-versa, I didn't know which, and my own Ma being
undoubtedly watched by the more or less Secret Service, all because of
her having taken a fancy to them whiskers of this Kiskoff cockoo, which
is the only explanation I could make of it, and after being a widow
twenty years she aught to of been ashamed of herself. Still, it was a
better explanation for her to of lost her head than her patriotism, and
I tried to think this the case. And my own position was something to
bring tears to a glass eye, what wi