Weekly Meredy.com E-book - Dodsworth - Part One

I love reading the books on which many classic flicks are based. In fact, I collect them. I thought you might like to read them, too. So, I'm starting something new. A free classic movie-related e-book will be featured weekly on my blog. And there will be a surprise waiting for you at the end of each book. :)

For today, I've chosen an old favorite of mine: Dodsworth by Sinclair Lewis.

Sinclair Lewis (Harry Sinclair Lewis)(February 7 1885 – January 10 1951) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters." His works are known for their insightful and critical views of American society and capitalist values, as well as their strong characterizations of modern working women.

As early as 1916, Lewis began taking notes for a realistic novel about small-town life. Work on that novel continued through mid-1920, when he completed Main Street which was published on October 23, 1920. As his biographer Mark Schorer wrote, the phenomenal success of Main Street "was the most sensational event in twentieth-century American publishing history." Based on sales of his prior books, Lewis's most optimistic projection was a sale of 25,000 copies. In the first six months of 1921 alone, Main Street sold 180,000 copies, and within a few years sales were estimated at two million. According to Richard Lingeman "Main Street earned Sinclair Lewis about three million current [2002] dollars."

He followed up this first great success with Babbitt (1922), a novel that satirized the American commercial culture and boosterism. The story was set in the fictional Zenith, Winnemac, a setting Lewis would return to in future novels, including Gideon Planish and Dodsworth.

Lewis' success in the 1920s continued with Arrowsmith (1925), a novel about an idealistic doctor which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize (which he refused). Elmer Gantry (1927), which depicted evangelicalism as hypocritical, was denounced by religious leaders and was banned in some U.S. cities. Lewis closed out the decade with Dodsworth (1929), a novel about the most affluent and successful members of American society leading essentially pointless lives in spite of their great wealth and advantages.

In 1930, Lewis won the Nobel Prize in Literature in his first year of nomination. In the Swedish Academy's presentation speech, special attention was paid to Babbitt. In his Nobel Lecture, he praised Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, and other contemporaries, but also lamented that "in America most of us — not readers alone, but even writers — are still afraid of any literature which is not a glorification of everything American, a glorification of our faults as well as our virtues," and that America is "the most contradictory, the most depressing, the most stirring, of any land in the world today."

Dodsworth is a satirical novel by American writer Sinclair Lewis first published by Harcourt Brace & Company in 1929. Its subject, the differences between US and European intellect, manners, and morals, is one that frequently appears in the works of Henry James.

The novel was adapted for the stage in 1934 by Sidney Howard and filmed in 1936 by William Wyler. Sidney Howard based the screenplay on his 1934 stage adaptation of the 1929 novel. The film starred Walter Huston, Ruth Chatterton, Paul Lukas, and Mary Astor.

Walter Huston appeared in the 1934 Broadway production, which co-starred Fay Bainter as Fran. Huston recreated his role for a Lux Radio Theater broadcast on October 4, 1937. Fay Bainter recreated her role in the Campbell Playhouse version broadcast on November 26, 1939.





A Meredy.com E-book

Title: Dodsworth (1929)
Author: Sinclair Lewis
Edition: 1
Language: English
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Date first posted: March 2009
Date most recently updated: March 2009

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---

Dodsworth
By
Sinclair Lewis


CHAPTER 1


The  aristocracy  of  Zenith  were dancing at the Kennepoose Canoe Club. They two-stepped on the wide porch, with its pillars of pine trunks, its
bobbing  Japanese lanterns; and never were there dance-frocks with wider sleeves nor hair more sensuously piled on little smiling heads, never an
August evening more moon-washed and spacious and proper for respectable romance.

Three  guests  had  come  in these new-fangled automobiles, for it was now 1903, the climax of civilization. A fourth automobile was approaching,
driven by Samuel Dodsworth.

The  scene was a sentimental chromo--crisping lake, lovers in canoes singing "Nelly Was a Lady," all very lugubrious and happy; and Sam Dodsworth
enjoyed  it.  He  was  a  large  and  formidable young man, with a healthy brown mustache and a chaos of brown hair on a massive head. He was, at
twenty-eight, assistant superintendent of that most noisy and unsentimental institution, the Zenith Locomotive Works, and in Yale (class of 1896)
he had played better than average football, but he thought well of the most sentimental sorts of moonlight.

Tonight  he  was  particularly  uplifted because he was driving his first car. And it was none of your old-fashioned "gasoline buggies," with the
engine  under  the seat. The engine bulked in front, under a proud hood over two feet long, and the steering column was not straight but rakishly
tilted.  The  car  was  sporting  and rather dangerous, and the lights were powerful affairs fed by acetylene gas. Sam sped on, with a feeling of
power, of dominating the universe, at twelve dizzy miles an hour.

At  the  Canoe Club he was greeted by Tub Pearson, admirable in white kid gloves. Tub--Thomas J. Pearson--round and short and jolly, class-jester
and  class-dandy  at  Yale, had been Sam Dodsworth's roommate and chief admirer throughout college, but now Tub had begun to take on an irritable
dignity as teller and future president of his father's bank in zenith.

"It runs!" Tub marveled, as Sam stepped in triumph from the car. "I've got a horse all ready to tow you back!"

Tub had to be witty, whatever happened.

"Certainly it runs! I'll bet I was up to eighteen miles an hour!"

"Yeh!  I'll  bet  that  some  day  automobiles'll  run  forty!" Tub jeered. "Sure! Why, they'll just about drive the poor old horse right off the
highway!"

"They will! And I'm thinking of tying up with this new Revelation Company to manufacture 'em."

"Not seriously, you poor chump?"

"Yes."

"Oh,  my  Lord!"  Tub wailed affectionately. "Don't be crazy, Sambo! My dad says automobiles are nothing but a fad. Cost too much to run. In five
years, he says, they'll disappear."

Sam's answer was not very logical:

"Who's the young angel on the porch?"

If she was an angel, the girl at whom Sam was pointing, she was an angel of ice; slim, shining, ash-blonde, her self-possessed voice very cool as
she parried the complimentary teasing of half a dozen admirers; a crystal candle-stick of a girl among black-and-white lumps of males.

"You  remember  her--Frances Voelker--Fran Voelker--old Herman's kid. She's been abroad for a year, and she was East, in finishing-school, before
that.  Just  a brat--isn't over nineteen or twenty, I guess. Golly, they say she speaks German and French and Italian and Woof-woof and all known
languages."

Herman  Voelker  had  brewed  his way into millions and respectability. His house was almost the largest in Zenith--certainly it had the greatest
amount of turrets, colored glass windows, and lace curtains--and he was leader among the German-Americans who were supplanting the New Englanders
throughout  the  state as controllers of finance and merchandising. He entertained German professors when they came lecturing and looking, and it
was  asserted  that  one  of  the  genuine  hand-painted pictures which he had recently brought back from Nuremberg was worth nearly ten thousand
dollars.  A  worthy  citizen, Herman, and his tart beer was admirable, but that this beef-colored burgher should have fathered anything so poised
and luminous as Fran was a miracle.

The sight of her made Sam Dodsworth feel clumsy as a St. Bernard looking at a white kitten. While he prophesied triumphs for the motor car, while
he  danced  with  other  girls,  he observed her airy dancing and her laughter. Normally, he was not particularly afraid of young women, but Fran
Voelker  seemed  too  fragile for his thick hands. Not till ten did he speak to her, when a partner left her, a flushed Corybant, in a chair near
Sam's.

"Do you remember me--Dodsworth? Years since I've seen you."

"Remember!  Heavens! I wondered if you were going to notice me. I used to steal the newspaper from Dad to get the news of your football heroisms.
And when I was a nice young devil of eight, you once chased me out of your orchard for stealing apples."

"Did I? Wouldn't dare to now! Mavenex' dance?"

"Well--Let me see. Oh. The next is with Levering Mott, and he's already ruined three of my two slippers. Yes."



If  he  did  not  dance with any particular neatness, a girl knew where she was, with Sam Dodsworth. He had enough strength and decision to let a
young  woman  understand who was doing the piloting. With Fran Voelker, he was inspired; he waltzed as though he was proud of his shining burden.
He  held  her lightly enough and, after the chaste custom of the era, his hands were gloved. But his finger-tips felt a current from her body. He
knew  that  she  was the most exquisite child in the world; he knew that he was going to marry her and keep her forever in a shrine; he knew that
after years of puzzled wonder about the purpose of life, he had found it.

"She's like a lily--no, she's too lively. She's like a humming bird--no, too kind of dignified. She's--oh, she's a flame!"



They  sat  talking  by  the  lake at midnight. Out on the dappled water, seen through a cloud of willow leaves, the youngsters in canoes were now
singing  "My  Old Kentucky Home." Zenith was still in the halcyon William Dean Howells days; not yet had it become the duty of young people to be
hard and brisk, and knowing about radios, jazz, and gin.

Fran  was a white shadow, in a lace shawl over her thin yellow dancing frock, as she drooped down on a newspaper which he had solemnly spread for
her on the long grass. Sam trembled a little, and sounded very pompous, rather boyish:

"I suppose you went everywhere in Europe."

"More or less. France and Spain and Austria and Switzerland and--Oh, I've seen the Matterhorn by moonlight, and Santa Maria della Salute at dawn.
And I've been almost frozen to death in a mistral at Avignon!"

"I suppose you'll be bored in Zenith."

She  laughed,  in a small competent way. "I know SO much about Europe--I'm no Cook's tripper!--that I know I don't know anything! All I can do in
French is to order breakfast. Six months from now, all I'll remember of Germany is the names of nineteen towns, and how the Potsdamer Platz looks
when you're waiting for a droschke. But you've DONE things. What are you doing now, by the way?"

"Assistant supe at the Locomotive Works. But I'm going to take a big gamble and--Ever ride in an automobile?"

"Oh yes, several times, in Paris and New York."

"Well, I believe that in twenty years, say by 1923 or '4, they'll be as common as buggies are now! I'm going in on a new company here--Revelation
Automobile  Company. I'll get less salary, but it's a swell gamble. Wonderful future. I've been working on my mechanical drawing lately, and I've
got  the  idea  that  they  ought  to get away from imitating carriages. Make a--it sounds highbrow, but I mean what you might call a new kind of
beauty for autos. Kind of long straight lines. The Revelation boss thinks I'm crazy. What do you think?"

"Oh, splendid!"

"And I've bought me an automobile of my own."

"Oh, really?"

"Let me drive you home tonight!"

"No, sorry; Mama is coming for me."

"You've got to let me take you for a ride. Soon!"

"Perhaps next Sunday. . . . We must go back to the clubhouse, don't you think?"

He  sprang  up,  meekly.  As  he  lifted  her to her feet, as he felt her slim hands, he murmured, "Certainly like to see Europe some day. When I
graduated,  I  thought  I'd  be  a  civil  engineer  and see the Brazil jungle and China and all over. Reg'lar Richard Harding Davis stuff! But--
Certainly going to see Europe, anyway. Maybe I might run into you over there, and you might show me some of it."

"I'd love to!"

Ah, if she desired Europe, he would master it, and give it to her on a platter of polished gold!



There  was the telephone call to her when he should have been installing machinery at the Revelation Automobile Company. There was the drive with
her  in  his  new  car, very careful, though once he ventured on seventeen miles an hour. There was the dinner at the Voelkers', in the room with
carved  beams  like  a  Hofbrauhaus,  and  Sam's  fear  that  if  Fran  was kept on food like this, roast goose and stuffed cabbage and soup with
Leberknodel, she would lose her race-horse slimness.

And  there  was  even a moment when, recalling his vow made in Massachusetts Tech after graduating from Yale that he would cut loose from America
and see the great world, he warned himself that between Fran and tying himself to the urgent new motor industry, he would be caught for life. The
vision  of  himself  as  a Richard Harding Davis hero returned wistfully. . . . Riding a mountain trail, two thousand sheer feet above a steaming
valley;  sun-helmet and whipcord breeches; tropical rain on a tin-roofed shack; a shot in the darkness as he sat over a square-face of gin with a
ragged  tramp of Noble Ancestry. But his mind fled back to the excitement of Fran's image: her spun-glass hair, her tingling hands, her lips that
were forever pursing in fantastic pouts, her chatter that fell suddenly into inexplicable silence, her cool sureness that made him feel foggy and
lumbering.



In a slaty November drizzle, they were tramping the cliffs along the Chaloosa River. Fran's cheeks were alight and she was humming, but when they
stopped  to  look at the wash of torn branches in the flooded river Sam felt that he must be protective. She was too slight and precious for such
hardship as an autumnal rain. He drew the edge of his mackintosh over her woolly English topcoat.

"You must be soaked! I'm a brute to let you stay out!"

She smiled at him, very close. "I like it!"

It seemed to him that she had snuggled closer. He kissed her--for the first time, and very badly indeed.

"Oh, please don't!" she begged, a little shocked, her lively self-possession gone.

"Fran, you've got to marry me!"

She slipped from the shelter of his raincoat and, arms akimbo, said impishly, "Oh, really? Is that a new law?"

"It is!"

"The great Yale athlete speaks! The automobile magnate!"

Very gravely: "No, just a scared lump of meat that's telling you he worships you!"

Still  she  stared  at him, among the autumn-bedraggled weeds on the river bank; she stared impudently, but quite suddenly she broke, covered her
eyes with her hands, and while he clumsily dabbled at her cheeks with a huge handkerchief, she sobbed:

"Oh,  Sam,  my  dear,  but  I'm so grasping! I want the whole world, not just Zenith! I DON'T want to be a good wife and mother and play cribbage
prettily! I want splendor! Great horizons! Can we look for them together?"

"We will!" said Sam.



It was not till 1908, when he had been married for five years to Fran Voelker and they had had two babies, Emily and Brent, that Samuel Dodsworth
came on his real struggle at the Revelation Automobile Company.

His  superiors  in  the  company had equally prized him for his steadiness and industry and fretted at him for being a dreamer. He was crazy as a
poet,  they  said. Not only did he venture to blaspheme against the great Renault-Darracq dogmas of car-designing, not only did he keep on raving
about  long "stream-lines," but he insisted that the largest profits would lie in selling automobiles as cheaply as possible to as many customers
as  possible. He was only assistant manager of production in 1908, but he owned a little stock, and his father-in-law, portly old Herman Voelker,
owned  more. It was hard to discharge Sam, even when he growled at the president of the company, "If you keep the Rev looking like the one-horse-
shay, we'll go bankrupt."

They  tried  to  buy  him  out,  and  Sam,  who  had  been absorbed in blue prints and steel castings, had to learn something about the tricks of
financing:  about  bonds, transfer of stock, call loans, discounts to dealers. With Voelker's money behind him, he secured twenty-three per cent.
of  the  stock,  he was made vice president and manager of production, he brought out the first four-door model, and he saw the Revelation become
the sensation of America for a season and one of its best-selling cars for a score of years.

And  never,  these  twenty years, did he come nearer to the Brazilian jungle than Wall Street, nearer to the tinkling pagodas than the Revelation
agency in Kansas City.

But he was too busy to be discontented; and he managed to believe that Fran loved him.



CHAPTER 2


Samuel  Dodsworth  discovered  that  there  was  a  snowstorm, nearly a blizzard, whirling about the house. He closed the windows with a bang and
plumped  back  into  bed  till  the room should be warm. He did not move so swiftly as he once had, and above the frogged silk pajamas which Fran
insisted on buying for him, his hair was gray. He was healthy enough, and serene, but he was tired, and he seemed far older than his fifty years.

Fran  was asleep in the farther of the twin beds, vast walnut structures with yellow silk draping. Sam looked about the bedroom. He had sometimes
caught  himself wondering if it wasn't too elaborate, but usually its floridness pleased him, not only as a sign of success but because it suited
the  luxurious  Fran.  Now  he noted contentedly the chaise longue, with a green and silver robe across it; the desk, with monogrammed stationery
very  severe and near-English and snobbish; Fran's bedside table, with jeweled traveling-clock, cigarettes, and the new novels; the bathroom with
its purple tiles.

Fran  stirred,  sighed and, while he chuckled at her resemblance to a child trying to slip back into dreams, she furiously burrowed her eyes into
the little lacy pillow, which was crumpled with her determined sleeping.

"No  use,"  he  said.  His  rather  heavy voice caressed her. "You know you're awake! Rise and shine! Face the problems of humanity and the grape
fruit!"

She  sat  up,  looking  at him with the astonishment she had never quite lost at being married, breaking a yawn with a smile, tousling her bobbed
hair  that  was  still  ash-blond, without gray. If Sam seemed older than his age, she was far younger. She was forty-one now, in 1925, but, rosy
with sleeping, she seemed thirty-one.

"I'm  going  to  have breakfast in bed you're smoking before breakfast again I haven't had breakfast in bed since yesterday," she yawned amiably,
while he swung his thick legs over the edge of his lilac satin comforter and lighted a cigarette.

"Yes. Stay in bed. Like to, myself. Devil of a snowstorm," he said, paddling round to stroke her hair, to nuzzle his ruddy cheek against her soft
fairness. "By the way, did I ever remember to tell you that I adore you?"

"Why--let me see--no, I don't believe so."

"Golly,  I'm  getting  absent-minded!  I'll  have  my secretary remind me to do it tomorrow." Seriously: "Realize that we finally wind up the old
Revelation Company today? Sort of sorry."

"No!  I'm  not a bit sorry! I'm delighted. You'll be free for the first time in all these years. Let's run off some place. Oh, don't let yourself
get  tied  up  with  anything new! So silly. We have enough money, and you go on stewing--'must change the design of the carburetor float--simply
must sell more cars in the territory between Medicine Hat and Woolawoola.' So silly! What does it MATTER! Do ring for the maid, darling."

"Well, no, maybe it doesn't matter, but fellow likes to do his job. It's kind of a battle; fun to beat the other fellow and put over a thundering
big sale. But I am rather tired. Wouldn't mind skipping off to Florida or some place."

"Let's!"

He had dutifully brought her heavy silver mirror, her brush and comb, her powder, her too-gorgeous lounging robe of Chinese brocade. When she had
made  herself  a  bit  older  by making herself youthful, she sat up in bed to read the Zenith Advocate-Times. If she looked fluffy and agreeably
useless, there was nothing fluffy in her sharp comments on the news. She sounded like a woman of many affairs, many committees.

"Humph!  That  idiot-boy  alderman,  Klingenger,  is  going  to oppose our playground bill. I'll wring his neck! . . . The D.A.R. are going to do
another pageant. I will NOT be Martha Washington! You might be George. You have his detestable majesticness."

"Me?" as he came from his bath. "I'm a clown. Wait till you see me in Florida!"

"Yes.  Pitching  horseshoes.  I  wouldn't  put  it past you, my beloved! . . . Huh! It says here the Candlelight Club expect to have Hugh Walpole
lecture, next season. I'll see our program committee pinches him off 'em."

He  was  slowly  dressing.  He  always  wore  large grave suits, brown or gray or plain blue, expensively tailored and not very interesting, with
decorous and uninteresting ties of dull silk and no jewelry save a watch-chain. But though you were not likely to see what he wore, you noted him
as  a  man  of  importance, as an executive, tall, deep-chested, his kind eyes never truculent, but his mouth serious, with crescents of wrinkles
beside  it.  His  gray-threaded  brown  mustache,  trimmed every week by the best barber at the best hotel, was fully as eccentric and showy as a
doormat.

He  made his toilet like a man who never wasted motions--and who, incidentally, had a perfectly organized household to depend upon. His hand went
surely  to the tall pile of shirts (Fran ordered them from Jermyn Street) in the huge Flemish armoire, and to the glacial nest of collars, always
inspected  by  the  parlor  maid  and  discarded  for  the  slightest fraying. He tied his tie, not swiftly but with the unwasteful and extremely
unadventurous precision of a man who has introduced as much "scientific efficiency" into daily domesticity as into his factory.

He kissed her and, while she nibbled at sweetbreads and drank her coffee in bird-like sips and furiously rattled the newspaper in bed, he marched
down-stairs  to  the  oak-beamed  dining-room. Over a second copy of the Advocate, and a Chicago paper, he ponderously and thoroughly attended to
orange juice, porridge and thick cream, bacon, corn cakes and syrup, and coffee in a cup twice as large as the cup which Fran was jiggling in her
thin hand as she galloped through the paper up-stairs.

To  the maid he said little, and that amiably, as one certain that he would be well served. He was not extraordinarily irritable even when he was
informed that Emily, his engaging daughter, had been up late at a dance and would not be down for breakfast. He liked Emily's morning gossip, but
he never dreamed of demanding her presence--of demanding anything from her. He smiled over the letter of his son, Brent, now a junior in Yale.

Samuel  Dodsworth  was,  perfectly, the American Captain of Industry, believing in the Republican Party, high tariff and, so long as they did not
annoy him personally, in prohibition and the Episcopal Church. He was the president of the Revelation Motor Company; he was a millionaire, though
decidedly  not  a  multimillionaire; his large house was on Ridge Crest, the most fashionable street in Zenith; he had some taste in etchings; he
did not split many infinitives; and he sometimes enjoyed Beethoven. He would certainly (so the observer assumed) produce excellent motor cars; he
would  make impressive speeches to the salesmen; but he would never love passionately, lose tragically, nor sit in contented idleness upon tropic
shores.



To  define  what  Sam  Dodsworth  was,  at fifty, it is easiest to state what he was not. He was none of the things which most Europeans and many
Americans  expect  in  a  leader  of  American industry. He was not a Babbitt, not a Rotarian, not an Elk, not a deacon. He rarely shouted, never
slapped  people on the back, and he had attended only six baseball games since 1900. He knew, and thoroughly, the Babbitts and baseball fans, but
only in business.

While  he  was  bored  by  free  verse  and cubism, he thought rather well of Dreiser, Cabell, and so much of Proust as he had rather laboriously
mastered.  He played golf reasonably well and did not often talk of his scores. He liked fishing-camps in Ontario, but never made himself believe
that  he preferred hemlock boughs to a mattress. He was common sense apotheosized, he had the energy and reliability of a dynamo, he liked whisky
and poker and pate de foie gras, and all the while he dreamed of motors like thunderbolts, as poets less modern than himself might dream of stars
and roses and nymphs by a pool.



A  crisis in life had been forced on him, for his Revelation Company was being absorbed by the Unit Automotive Company--the imperial U.A.C., with
its  seven  makes  of  motors, its body-building works, its billion dollars of capital. Alec Kynance, president of the U.A.C., was in Zenith, and
today the final transfer of holdings was to be made.

Sam  had  wanted  to  fight the U.A.C., to keep independent this creation to which he had devoted twenty-two years, but his fellow directors were
afraid.  The  U.A.C.  could put on the market a car as good as the Revelation at a lower price, and drive them from the market. If necessary, the
U.A.C.  could  sell  below  cost  for a year or two. But they wanted the Revelation label and would pay for it. And the U.A.C. cossacks were good
fellows. They did not treat Sam like a captive, but as a fellow warrior, to be welcomed to their larger army, so at the last Sam hid from himself
the belief that the U.A.C., with their mass production, would cheapen and ruin the Revelation and turn his thunderbolt into a standardized cigar-
lighter, and he had agreed to their generous purchase price.

He was not happy about it, when he let himself think abstractly. But he was extremely well trained, from his first days in Zenith High School, in
not letting himself do anything so destructive as abstract thinking.



Sam  clumped  up-stairs  and found Fran, very brisk, fairly cheerful, still in her brocade dressing-gown but crouching over her desk, dashing off
notes:  suggestions  to  partisans  in  her various clubs, orders to the secretaries of the leagues which she supported--leagues for the study of
democracy,  leagues for the blind, societies for the collection of statistics about the effect of alcohol on plantation-hands in Mississippi. She
was  interested  in  every  aspect  of  these  leagues except perhaps the purposes for which they had been founded, and no Indiana politician was
craftier at soaping enemies, advising friends, and building up a political machine to accomplish nothing in particular.

She shone at Sam as he lumbered in, but she said abruptly, "Sit down, please. I want to talk to you."

("Oh, Lord, what have I done now?") He sat meekly in a chintz-covered overstuffed chair.

"Sam!  I've been thinking lately. I didn't want to speak to you about it till you had the U.A.C. business all finished. But I'm afraid you'll get
yourself tied up with some new job, and I want to go to Europe!"

"Well--"

"Wait!  This  may be our only chance, the only time you'll be free till we're so old we won't enjoy wandering. Let's take the chance! There'll be
time for you to create a dozen new kinds of cars when we come back. You'll do it all the better if you have a real rest. A real one! I don't want
to go just for a few months, but for a solid year."

"Good Heavens!"

"Yes,  they  are  good! Think! Here's Emily going to be married next month. Then she won't need us. Brent has enough friends in college. He won't
need  us.  I  can  chuck all these beastly clubs and everything. They don't mean anything; they're just make-believe, to keep me busy. I'm a very
active  female,  Sam,  and  I  want  to do something besides sitting around Zenith. Think what we could do! Spring on the Italian Lakes! Motoring
through the Tyrol! London in the Season! And I've never seen Europe since I was a girl, and you've never seen it at all. Let yourself have a good
time for once! Trust me, can't you, dear?"

"Well,  it  would  be  kind  of nice to get away from the grind. I'd like to look over the Rolls-Royce and Mercedes plants. And see Paris and the
Alps. But a year--That's a long time. I think we'd get pretty tired of Europe, living around in hotels. But--I really haven't made any plans. The
U.A.C.  business  was  so  sudden. I would like to see Italy. Those hill-towns must be very curious. And so old. We'll talk about it tonight. Auf
wiedersehen, old lady."

He  tramped  out,  apparently  as  dependable as an old Newfoundland and as little given to worrying about anything more complex than the hiding-
places of bones. But he was fretting as he sat erect in his limousine, while Smith drove him into town.

These  moments  of  driving  were the only times when he was alone. He was as beset by people--his wife, his daughter, his son, his servants, his
office-staff,  his  friends at lunch and on the golf course--as in his most frenziedly popular days at college, when it had been his "duty to old
Yale"  to  be  athletic and agreeable, and never to be alone, certainly never to sit and think. People came to him, swarmed about him, wanted his
advice  and his money and the spiritual support which they found in his ponderous caution. Yet he liked to be alone, he liked to meditate, and he
made up for it on these morning rides.

"She's  right," he worried. "I'd better not let her know how right she is, or she'll yank me off to London before I can pack my flask. I wonder--
Oh  yes,  of course, she does care for me, a lot. But sometimes I wish she weren't quite so good a manager. She just tries to amuse me by playing
at  being  a  kitten.  She isn't one, not by a long shot. She's a greyhound. Sometimes when I'm tired, I wish she just wanted to cuddle up and be
lazy with me. She's quicksilver. And quicksilver is hard, when you try to compress it!

"Oh,  that's  unfair. She's been the best wife--I haven't given enough time to courting her, what with all this cursed business. And I'm tired of
business. Like to sit around and chat and get acquainted with myself. And I'm tired of these streets!"

The  limousine  was  laboring  through  a  gusty  snowstorm, skidding a bit on icy asphalt, creaking and lumbering as it climbed over drifts. The
windows of the car were frost-emblazoned. Sam impatiently cleared a peep-hole with the heel of his glove.

They  were  creeping along Conklin Avenue, where the dreary rows of old red brick mansions, decayed into boarding houses, the cheap grocery shops
and  dirty  laundries and gloomy little "undertaking parlors" and lunch-rooms with the blatant sign "Eats," not very entrancing at any time, were
turned  by  the  rags  of  blown  snow into the bleakness of a lumber-camp, while the breadth of the street made it only the more shelterless and
unintimate.  On  either  side  were streets of signboards advertising oil and cigarettes, of wooden one-story shacks between old-fashioned yellow
brick tenement-houses gloomy in the sunless snow; a region of poverty without picturesqueness and of labor without hope.

"Oh, Lord, I'd like to get away from it! Be nice to see the Mediterranean and a little sunshine," Sam muttered. "Let's go!"



The General Offices of the Revelation Motor Company were in an immense glass and marble building on Constitution Avenue, North, above Court House
Square,  opposite  the  flashing  new skyscraper of the Plymouth National Bank. The entrance to the floor given to executive offices was like the
lobby  of  a  pretentious  hotel--waiting-room in brocade and tapestry and Grand Rapids renaissance; then something like an acre of little tables
with  typists and typists and typists, very busy, and clerks and clerks and clerks, with rattling papers; and a row of private offices resembling
furniture  showrooms,  distinguished  by  enormous  desks  in  imitation  of  refectory  tables, covered with enormous sheets of plate glass, and
fanatically kept free of papers and all jolly disorder.

The  arrival  of  President  Dodsworth  was like that of a General Commanding. "Good morning!" rumbled the uniformed doorman, a retired sergeant.
"Good  MORNING!"  chirped  the  girl  at  the  inquiry  desk, a charming girl whose gentleman-friend was said to be uncommonly high up in the fur
business.  "Good  morning!"  indicated the typists and clerks, their heads bowing like leaves agitated by a flitting breeze as he strode by them.
"GOOD  morning!"  caroled  Sam's  private  stenographer as he entered his own office. "GOOD MORNING!" shouted his secretary, an offensively high-
pressure  young  slave-driver.  And  even  the  red-headed  Jewish  office  boy,  as  he took Sam's coat and hung it up so that it would not dry,
condescended "Mornin', boss."

Yet  today all this obsequiousness, normally not unpleasant to the Great Man, annoyed him; all this activity, this proof that ever so many people
were sending out ever so many letters about things presumably of importance, seemed to him an irritating fussiness. What did it matter whether he
had  another  hundred  thousand  dollars to leave to Brent? What did it matter whether John B. Johnson of Jonesburg did or did not take the local
Revelation  agency? Why were all these hundreds of young people willing to be turned into machines for the purposes of rattling papers and bowing
to the president?

The Great Man approached his desk, put on his eye-glasses, and graciously received a stock-report, as one accomplishing empires.

But the Great Man was thinking:

"They make me tired--poor devils! Come on, Fran! Let's go! Let's drift way round to China!"



Alec Kynance, president of the Unit Automotive Company, with his regiment of officers, lawyers, secretaries, was not coming for half an hour. Sam
said  impulsively  to  his  stenographer, "Miss Rachman, skip down to the travel bureau at the Thornleigh, won't you please, and bring me all the
steamship folders and European travel information and so on that they have there. And round-the-world."

While  he waited for her he turned over the papers in the wire basket which his secretary had reverently laid on the glass-topped vastness of his
desk. These matters had seemed significant a few days ago, like orders given in battle, but now that the Revelation Company was no longer his--

He  sighed, he shuffled the papers indifferently: The secret report on the dissipations of the manager of the Northwestern Division. The plans of
the advertising agency for notices about the union of the U.A.C. and the Revelation, which was to be announced with glad, gaudy public rejoicing.
What did they MATTER, now that he was turned from a bandit captain to a clerk?

For the first time he admitted that if he went to the U.A.C., even as first vice president, he would be nothing more than an office boy. He could
make  no  daring  decisions by himself. THEY had taken from him the pride in pioneering which was one of his props in life--and who THEY were, he
didn't  quite know. THEY were something more than just Alec Kynance and a few other officers of the U.A.C. THEY were part of a booming industrial
flood  which was sweeping over him. THEY would give him a larger house, a yacht, but THEY would not give him work that was really his own. He had
helped to build a machine which was running away from him. He had no longer the dignity of a craftsman. He made nothing; he meant nothing; he was
no longer Samuel Dodsworth, but merely part of a crowd vigorously pushing one another toward nowhere.

He  wandered  to  the  window.  In  that blast of snow, the shaft of the Plymouth National Bank Building was aspiring as a cathedral; twenty gray
stories,  with  unbroken  vertical  lines  swooping  up  beyond  his vision into the snowy fog. It had nobility, but it seemed cruel, as lone and
contemptuous of friendly human efforts as a forgotten tower on the Siberian steppes. How indifferently it would watch him starve and freeze!

With  relief he looked at the travel brochures when his stenographer brought them in--a lively girl, shaking the snow from her little cloche hat,
beaming  at  him,  assuring  him  that he really did exist and was something of importance still. Then he was lost in the pictures. . . . Titanic
walls  of  the  Grand  Canyon:  scarlet pillars and pyramids of orange. A tawny road in Algiers, the sun baking, nodding camels, and drivers with
dusky  malign  faces  under  their  turbans.  St.  Moritz, shadowed by the mountains, and a pretty girl on a toboggan. A terrace at Cannes, where
through  fig-trees and palms and tumbling roses you looked on the sea with a lone felucca. A valley of colored patchwork fields seen from a harsh
tor  of  Dartmoor.  Japanese  children  rollicking among cherry trees beside a tiny temple. Dark wood of carven mediaeval houses looming over the
Romerberg  at  Frankfort.  The  Grand Canal, with the fantastic columns of the piazzetta and the soft pink and cream of the ducal palace. The old
sea-fronted  walls of Ragusa. The streets of Paris--kiosks, impudent advertisements, a whisk of skirts, a whirligig of traffic, and little tables
at which to loaf all day long.

"Wouldn't be so bad!" thought Sam. "I'd like to wander around a few months. Only I'm not going to let Fran coax me into being one of these wishy-
washy  expatriates,  homeless,  afraid of life, living on the Riviera as though they were in a sanatorium for neurotics. I'm going to go on doing
something  with  life,  and  my place is here. We'll go abroad, only I'll make her fight for it or she'll feel she's running the whole show. Then
I'll come back here, and I'll take Alec Kynance's show right away from him!"

"Mr. Kynance is here," announced his secretary.



CHAPTER 3


Mr.  Alexander  Kynance,  president of the Unit Automotive Company, was a small bustling man with a large head, an abrupt voice, a lively mind, a
magnificent lack of scruples, and a love for oratory and Corona-Coronas. He had been a section-hand and a railway superintendent, he had the best
cellar of Burgundies in Detroit, and he made up for his runtiness by barking at people.

"Everything  all  ready?  Everything  all  ready?" he barked at Sam Dodsworth, as the dozen representatives of the two companies settled down and
rested their elbows on the gigantic mirror-surfaced table in the gold and oak directors'-room.

"I think so," Sam drawled.

"Just  a  few  things left," said Kynance. "We've about decided to run the Revelation in between the Chromecar and the Highroad in class--drop it
three hundred below your price--two-door sedan at eleven-fifty."

Sam  wanted  to  protest. Hadn't he kept the price down to the very lowest at which his kind of car could be built? But suddenly--What difference
did  it  make?  The  Revelation  wasn't his master, his religion! He was going to have a life of his own, with Fran, lovely loyal Fran, whom he'd
imprisoned here in Zenith!

Let's go!

He  was scarcely listening to Kynance's observations on retaining the slogan "You'll revel in a Revelation." Sam had always detested this battle-
cry.  It  was  the  invention of a particularly bright and bounding young copy-writer who took regular exercise at the Y.M.C.A., but the salesmen
loved it. As Kynance snapped, "Good slogan--good slogan--full o' pep," Sam mused:

"They're all human megaphones. And I'm tired."



When  he  had  rather sadly signed the transfer of control to the U.A.C. and his lifework was over, with no chance for retreat, Sam shook hands a
great deal with a number of people, and was left alone with Alec Kynance.

"Now  to  real  business,  old man," Kynance blatted. "You'll be tickled to death at getting hooked up with a concern that can control the world-
market one of these days--regular empire, b' God!--instead of crawling along having to depend on a bunch of so-so assistants. We want you to come
with  us,  of  course.  I  haven't been hinting around. Hinting ain't my way. When Alec Kynance has something to say, by God he shoots! I want to
offer you the second vice-presidency of the U.A.C., in general charge of production of all our eight cars, including the Rev. You've been getting
sixty thousand salary, besides your stock?"

"Yes."

"We  can  offer  you eighty-five, and your share in the managers' pool, with a good chance for a hundred thou in a few years, and you'll probably
succeed  me when the bootlegged hootch gets me. And you'll have first-class production-men under you. You can take it easy and just think up mean
ideas  to  shove  over.  Other night you were drooling about how you'd like to make real Ritzy motor caravans with electric stoves and radios and
everything  built in. Try it! We've got the capital. And this idea you had about a motorized touring-school for boys in summer. Try it! Why, God,
we  might run all these summer camps out of business and make a real killing--get five hundred thousand customers--kid that hadn't gone on one of
our  tours,  no class to him at all! Try it! And the U.A.C. getting into aeroplane manufacture. Go ahead. Draw up your plans. Yes sir, that's the
kind  of  support  we  give a high-class man. When do you want to go to work? I suppose you'll have to move to Detroit, but you can get back here
pretty often. Want to start right in, and see things zip?"

Sam's  fantastic  schemes  for  supercaravans, for an ambulatory summer school in which boys should see the whole country from Maine pines to San
Joaquin  wheat-fields, schemes which he had found stimulating and not very practical, were soiled by the lobster-faced little man's insistence on
cashing in. No!

"First,  I  think  I'll  take  a vacation," Sam said doubtfully. "Haven't had a real one for years. Maybe I'll run over to Europe. May stay three
months or so."

"Europe?  Rats!  Dead's a doornail! Place for women and long-haired artists. Dead! Only American loans that keep 'em from burying the corpse! All
this  art!  More  art  in a good shiny spark-plug than in all the fat Venus de Mylos they ever turned out. Naw! Go take a run through California,
maybe  grab  a  drink  of good liquor in Mexico, and then come with us. Look here, Dodsworth. My way of being diplomatic is to come out flat. You
necking around with some other concern? We can't wait. We got to turn out the cars! I can't keep this open, and I've offered you our pos-o-lutely
highest salary. That's the way we do business. Yes or no?"

"I'm not flirting with any other company. I've had several offers and turned them down. Your offer is fair."

"Fine!  Let's  sign  the  contract right now. Got her here! Put down your John Hancock, and begin to draw the ole salary from this minute, with a
month's vacation on pay! How's that?"

With the noisiness of a little man making an impression, Kynance slapped the contract on the glowing directors'-table, flourished an enormous red
and black fountain pen, and patronizingly poked Sam in the shoulder.

Irritably Sam rumbled, "I can't tie myself up without thinking it over. I'll give you my answer as soon as I can. Probably in a week or so. But I
may want to take a four-months rest in Europe. Never mind about the pay meanwhile. Rather feel free."

"My  God,  man,  what do you think is the purpose of life? Loafing? Getting by with doing as little as you can? I tell you, what I always say is:
there's  no  rest  like a little extra work! You ain't tired--you're just fed up with this backwoods town. Come up to Detroit and see how we make
things  hum!  Come sit in with us and hear us tell Congress where it gets off. Work! That's the caper! I tell you," with a grotesque, evangelical
sonorousness,  "I  tell you, Dodsworth, to me, work is a religion. 'Turn not thy hand from the plow.' Do big things! Think of it; by making autos
we're  enabling half the civilized world to run into town from their pig-sties and see the movies, and the other half to get out of town and give
Nature  the once-over. Twenty million cars in America! And in twenty more years we'll have the bloomin' Tibetans and Abyssinians riding on cement
roads in U.A.C. cars! Talk about Napoleon! Talk about Shakespeare! Why, we're pulling off the greatest miracle since the Lord created the world!

"Europe?  How in hell would you put IN four months? Think you could stand more'n ten art galleries? I KNOW! I've seen Europe! Their Notre Dame is
all  right  for  about  half  an hour, but I'd rather see an American assembly-plant, thousand men working like a watch, than all their old, bum-
lighted, tumble-down churches--"

It was half an hour before Sam got rid of Kynance without antagonizing him, and without signing a contract.

"I'd  like,"  Sam  reflected,  "to  sit under a linden tree for six straight months and not hear one word about Efficiency or Doing Big Things or
anything more important than the temperature of the beer--if there is anything more important."



He had fallen into rather a rigid routine. Most days, between office and home, he walked to the Union Club in winter, drove to the golf course in
summer.  But tonight he was restless. He could not endure the fustiness of the old boys at the club. His chauffeur would be waiting there, but on
his way to the club Sam stopped, with a vague notion of tasting foreignness, at a cheap German restaurant.

It  was  dark,  quiet, free of the bouncing grandeur of Kynances. At a greasy oilcloth-covered table he sat sipping coffee and nibbling at sugar-
crusted coffee-cake.

"Why should I wear myself out making more money for myself--no, for Kynance! He will like hell take my caravans away from me!"

He  dreamed of a very masterwork of caravans: a tiny kitchen with electric stove, electric refrigerator; a tiny toilet with showerbath; a living-
room  which  should become a bedroom by night--a living-room with a radio, a real writing desk; and on one side of the caravan, or at the back, a
folding verandah. He could see his caravanners dining on the verandah in a forest fifty miles from any house.

"Kind of a shame to have 'em ruin any more wilderness. Oh, that's just sentimentality," he assured himself. "Let's see. We ought to make that up-
-" He was figuring on a menu. "We ought to produce those in quantities for seventeen hundred dollars, and our selling-point will be the saving in
hotel  bills.  Like to camp in one myself! I will not let Kynance have my ideas! He'd turn the caravans out, flimsy and uncomfortable, for eleven
hundred,  and  all he'd think about would be how many we could slam on the market. Kynance! Lord, to take his orders, to stand his back-slapping,
at fifty! No!"

The German restaurant-keeper said, as one content with all seasons and events, "Pretty bad snow tonight."

"Yes."

And  to himself: "There's a fellow who isn't worrying about Doing Big Things. And work isn't his religion. His religion is roast goose, which has
some  sense  to  it. Yes, let's go, Fran! Then come back and play with the caravan. . . . Or say, for an elaborate rig, why not two caravans, one
with  kitchen  and toilet and stores, other with living-bedroom, and pitch 'em back to back, with a kind of train-vestibule door, and have a real
palace for four people? . . . I would like to see Monte Carlo. Must be like a comic opera."



His  desire for Monte Carlo, for palms and sunshine and the estimable fish of the Prince of Monaco, was enhanced by jogging through the snowstorm
in  his  car, by being held up in drifts, and clutching the undercurving seat during a rather breathless slide uphill to Ridge Crest. But when he
entered  the warmth of the big house, when he sat in the library alone (Fran was not yet back from the Children's Welfare Bridge), with a whisky-
soda and a volume of Masereel woodcuts, when he considered his deep chair and the hearth-log and the roses, Sam felt the security of his own cave
and  the  assurance  to  be  found in familiar work, in his office-staff, in his clubs, his habits and, most of all, his friends and Fran and the
children.

He  regarded  the  library  contentedly:  the many books, some of them read--volumes of history, philosophy, travels, detective stories; the oak-
framed  fireplace  with  a  Mary  Cassatt  portrait of children above it; the blue davenport; the Biedermeyer rug from Fran's kin in Germany; the
particularly elaborate tantalus.

"Pretty  nice.  Hotels--awful! Oh yes, I'll probably go over to the U.A.C. But maybe take six weeks or a couple of months in Europe, then move to
Detroit.  But  not  sell  this  house! Been mighty happy here. Like to come back here and spend our old days. When I really make my pile, I'll do
something  to help turn Zenith into another Detroit. Get a million people here. Only, plan the city right. Make it the most beautiful city in the
world. Not just sit around on my chair in Europe and look at famous cities, but MAKE one!"



Once  a  month, Sam's closest friends, Tub Pearson, his humorous classmate who was now the gray and oracular president of the Centaur State Bank,
Dr.  Henry  Hazzard, the heart specialist, Judge Turpin, and Wheeler, the packing-house magnate, came in for dinner and an evening of poker, with
Fran as hostess at dinner but conveniently disappearing after it.

Fran  whisked  in  from  her  charity  bridge  as  he was going up to dress. In her sleek coat of gray squirrel she was like a snow-sprinkled cat
pouncing  on  flying  leaves. She tossed her coat and hat to the waiting maid, and kissed Sam abruptly. She was virginal as the winter wind, this
girl who was the mother of Emily about to be married.

"Terrible  bore, the bridge. I won seventeen dollars. I'm a good little bridge-player, I am. We must hustle it's almost dinnertime oh what a bore
Lucile  McKelvey  is  with  her  perpetual gabble about Italy I bet I'll learn more Italian in three weeks than she has in three trips come on my
beloved we are LATE!"

"We are going then?"

"Going where?"

"To Europe."

"Oh, I don't know. Think how nice it would be for you to 'pitch a wicked horseshoe,' as dear Tub would say, in Florida."

"Oh, quit it!"

As  they  tramped  up-stairs  he tucked his arm about her, but she released herself, she smiled at him too brightly--smile glittering and flat as
white  enamel  paint--urbane  smile that these twenty years had made him ashamed of his longing for her--and she said, "We must hurry, lamb." And
too  brightly  she added, "Don't drink too much tonight. It's all right with people like Tub Pearson, but Judge Turpin is so conservative--I know
he doesn't like it."



She  had  a high art of deflating him, of enfeebling him, with one quick, innocent-sounding phrase. By the most careless comment on his bulky new
overcoat  she  could  make  him  feel  like  a lout in it; by crisply suggesting that he "try for once to talk about SOMETHING besides motors and
stocks,"  while they rode to a formidable dinner to an elocutionary senator, she could make him feel so unintelligent that he would be silent all
evening.  The  easy self-confidence which weeks of industrial triumphs had built up in him she could flatten in five seconds. She was, in fact, a
genius  at  planting in him an assurance of his inferiority. Thus she did tonight, in her nicest and friendliest way, and instantly the lumbering
Ajax  began  to  look doubtfully toward the poker he had always enjoyed, to fear the opinion of Judge Turpin--an eye-glassed sparrow of a man who
seemed to admire Sam, and who showed his reverence for the law by taking illicit drink for drink with him.

Sam felt unworthy and apologetic till he had dressed and been cheered by a glimpse of his daughter, Emily.



Emily,  as  a  child,  had  been his companion; he had always understood her, seemed nearer to her than to Fran. She had been a tomboy, sturdy of
shoulder, jolly as an old family dog out on a walk.

He used to come to the nursery door, lamenting:

"Milord, the Duke of Buckin'um lies wownded at the gate!"

Emily and Brent would wail joyously, "Not seriowsly, I trust," and he answer, "Mortually, I fear."

They had paid him the compliment of being willing to play with him, Emily more than the earnest young Brent.

But  Emily  had  been  drawn,  these  last  five  years,  into  the  tempestuous life of young Zenith; dances, movie parties, swimming in summer,
astonishingly  unrestricted  companionship  with  any number of boys; a life which bewildered Sam. Now, at twenty, she was to be married to Harry
McKee,  assistant  general manager of the Vandering Bolt and Nut Company (considered in Zenith a most genteel establishment), ex-tennis-champion,
captain  during  the  Great  War,  a man of thirty-four who wore his clothes and his slang dashingly. The parties had redoubled, and Sam realized
wistfully that Emily and he had no more of their old, easy, chuckling talks.

As  he marched down to supervise the cocktails for dinner, Emily flew in, blown on the storm, crying at him, "Oh, Samivel, you old beautiful! You
look like a grand duke in your dinner jacket! You sweet thing! Damn it, I've got to be at Mary Edge's in twenty minutes!"

She galloped up-stairs, and he stood looking after her and sighed.

"I'd better begin to dig in against the lonely sixties," he brooded.

He  shivered  as he went out to tell the butler-for-the-evening how to prepare the cocktails, after which, he knew, the butler would prepare them
to suit himself, and probably drink most of them.



Sam  remembered  that this same matter of a butler for parties only had been the subject of rather a lot of pourparlers between Fran and himself.
She  wanted  a  proper butler in the house, always. And certainly they could afford one. But every human being has certain extravagances which he
dare not assume, lest he offend the affectionate and jeering friends of his youth--the man who has ventured on spats dares not take to a monocle-
-the statesman who has ventured on humor dares not be so presumptuous as to venture on honesty also. Somehow, Sam believed that he could not face
Tub Pearson if he had anything so effete as a regular butler in the house, and Fran had not won . . . not yet.



Tub  Pearson--the  Hon.  Thos.  J.  Pearson,  former  state-senator,  honorary LL.D. of Winnemac University, president of the Centaur State Bank,
director  in  twelve  companies,  trustee  of  the  Loring  Grammar School and of the Zenith Art Institute, chairman of the Mayor's City Planning
Commission--Tub  Pearson  was  still  as  much  the  jester  as  he had been at Yale. He and his lively wife Matilde, known as "Matey," had three
children, but neither viceregal honors nor domesticity had overlaid Tub's view of himself as a natural comedian.

All  through  the  poker-game,  at  the  large table in Sam's library, where they sat with rolled-up sleeves and loosened collars, gurgling their
whisky-sodas with gratified sighs, Tub jabbed at Judge Turpin for sentencing bootleggers while he himself enjoyed his whisky as thoroughly as any
one  in  Zenith.  When  they rested--that is to say, re-filled their glasses--at eleven, and Sam suggested, "May not have any more poker with you
lads for a while, because Fran and I may trot over to Europe for six months or so," then Tub had an opportunity suitable to his powers:

"Six  months!  That's  elegant,  Sambo.  You'll  come  back with an English accent: 'Hy sye, hold chappie, cawn't I 'ave the honor of raising the
bloomin' pot a couple o' berries, dear old dream?'"

"Ever hear an Englishman talk like that?"

"No,  but  you  will!  Six  months! Oh, don't be a damn' fool! Go for two months, and then you'll be able to appreciate getting back to a country
where you can get ice and a bath-tub."

"I know it's a heresy," Sam drawled, "but I wonder if there aren't a few bath-tubs in Europe? Think I'll go over and see. My deal."

He  did not show it; he played steadily, a rectangular-faced, large man, a cigar gripped in his mouth, cards dwarfed in his wide hand; but he was
raging within:

"I've  been  doing  what people expected me to, all my life. Football in college, when I'd as soon've stuck in the physics laboratory. Make money
and play golf and be a good Republican ever since. Human cash-register! I'm finished! I'm going!"

But they heard from him only "Whoop you two more. Cards?"



CHAPTER 4


It  was  late when Sam yawned up to bed, for their poker-game had lasted till after one. The spacious chamber was half lighted from the bathroom.
The  dusky light caught the yellow silk curtains by her bed, the crystal on her wide dressing-table. She had left the windows closed, and the air
was not unpleasantly stuffy with cold cream, powder, and steaminess lingering from a hot bath scented with bath-salts.

He was eager for her breathing presence. His determination to escape with her had made Fran seem nearer and more desirable than in months, but as
he felt guilty about awakening her, he did not admit that he was doing anything so unkind--he merely dropped his shoes loudly.

She  looked  startled  when  she awoke. How many times she had looked startled, a little incredulous, when she had stirred to discover him beside
her!  She  turned  on  her  bedside  light,  she looked at him vaguely, as though she wasn't quite sure who he was, but, after all, one had to be
polite. She was incredibly young and unmarked with wrinkles, a girl in a lace nightgown edged at the neck with white fur.

He  plumped  down on the bed beside her, kissed her shoulder. She suffered it, unresponding, and said, too cheerily, "Please no! Not now. Listen,
dear, I want to talk. Ohhhhh, gee, I'm sleepy! I tried to stay awake till you came up, but I dozed off. So 'shamed! But pull up the big chair and
listen."

"Don't you want me to kiss you?"

"Why do you always ask that? In that hurt way? You're so silly! You know you've had several drinks. Oh, I don't mind--though Tub and you, for men
that are responsible citizens and don't really drink at all, always do manage to tuck away a lot too much! I don't mind. But don't you think it's
a little icky, this sudden passion for embracing when you're--well, exhilarated?"

"Don't you WANT me to kiss you?"

"Good  Heavens, my dear man, haven't I been your wife for twenty-two years? Oh, please, dear, don't be quarrelsome! Have I done something to hurt
you? I'm so, so terribly sorry! I am, truly, dear. Kiss me!"

It was the coolest, most brief of kisses that she gave him and, that chore done, most briskly she rattled, "Now pull up the big chair and listen,
dear. Or would you rather wait till tomorrow?"

She added, with the imitation of baby-talk which ordinarily tickled him, "Is mos' awful' important!"

He  dragged the wing-chair to her bed and decorously sat down, wagging a varnished pump, but he said testily, "Good Lord, you don't need to coax.
Let's have it."

"Oh, don't be such an old grump! Now I ask you: IS that fair? Because I don't like the reek of whisky? Would you like it on my breath?"

"No. But I didn't take much. But--Never mind. Listen, Fran. I know what you want. And I've decided. Kynance tried to tie me up with a contract to
go to work right away, but I refused. So we'll go to Europe, and maybe for four-five months!"

"Oh. That."

With  all  his  experience  of her zig-zag incalculability, her shreds of knowledge that seemed to have no source, her ambitions and desires that
seemed  not  worth  the  pains,  her  veiled resentment of hurts which he had not meant to inflict, her amiability when he had expected her to be
angry, he was surprised now at her indifference.

"It's  more  fundamental than going to Europe. See here, Sam. Even if I didn't want to, oh, kiss you--Sorry I don't seem to be more passionate. I
wish I were, for your sake. But apparently I'm not. But even so, we have been happy, haven't we! We have built something pretty fine!"

"Yes, we have. What's worrying--"

"Even if we haven't been wild operatic lovers, I do think we mean something awfully deep and irreplaceable to each other. Don't we?"

His  touchy  ardor gave way to affection. He reached his long arm out and patted her slight, nervous fingers. "Yes. We differ on a lot of things,
but I guess we've got something solid for each other that we can't find in anybody else."

"Something really permanent, Sam? Dependable? So we're like two awfully good friends backing each other in a terrible street fight?"

"Absolutely. But what's--"

"Listen. We've done the first part of our jobs. We've made enough money. We've brought up the children. You have something to show for your work-
-this  really  marvelous  car  that you've created. And yet we're still young, comparatively. Oh, let's not settle down into contentment with the
dregs  of  life!  Let's have a new life, all over, and not worry any more about duties (and I've had my own, young man--if you think it's easy to
run  a  house  like this, and entertain everybody!). Let's--oh, it's hard to express it, but I mean: let's not tie ourselves down to saying we'll
come  back  from  Europe  (but it was sweet of you, dear, to consent without making me beg), but I mean: let's not insist that we HAVE to be back
from Europe in four months--yes, or four years! On the other hand, if we don't like it, let's not feel we have to stay; let's take the first boat
back.  But  let's--Oh, please now, get this! Let's start out of this stupid old town without one single solitary plan in our heads beyond landing
in Europe, and coming back when we really want to, and going where we please when we please. Maybe we'll be back after two months on the Riviera,
and  then again, forty years from now, we may be living in a bamboo shack in Java and thumbing our noses at anybody who doesn't like it! Why, I'd
almost like to sell this house, so we won't have anything to bind us."

"You're  not  serious?  Good Lord, we couldn't do that! Why, it's our home! Wouldn't know what to do if we didn't have a safe harbor like this to
come back to! Why, we've built ourselves into this old place, from the Radiola to the new garage doors. I guess I know every dahlia in the garden
by  its  middle  name! I love the place the way I do Emily and you and the boy. Only place where we can slam the door and tell everybody to go to
hell and be ourselves!"

"But  perhaps we'll get us some new selves, without losing the old ones. You'd--oh, you could be so magnificent, so tall and impressive and fine,
if  you'd  let  yourself  be, if you didn't feel you had to be just an accessory to a beastly old medium-priced car, if you'd get over this silly
fear  that  people might think you were affected and snobbish if you demanded the proper respect from them! There ARE great people in the world--
dukes  and  ambassadors  and generals and scientists and--And I don't believe that essentially they're one bit bigger than we are. It's just that
they've  been trained to talk of world-affairs, instead of the price of vanadium and what Mrs. Hibbletebibble is going to serve at her Hallowe'en
party.  I'm  going to be one of 'em! I'm not afraid of 'em! If you'd only get over this naive passion for 'simplicity' and all those nice peasant
virtues  and  let  yourself  be  the big man that you really are! Not meekly say to His Excellency that though you look like a grand-duke, you're
really  only  little  Sammy  Dodsworth of Zenith! He won't know it unless you insist on telling him! . . . And perhaps an ambassadorship for you,
after  you've been abroad long enough to learn the tricks. . . . Only to do all that, to grab the world, we must NOT be bound by the feeling that
we're tied to this slow-pokey Zenith till death do us part from the fun of adventuring!"

"But to sell the house--"

"Oh,  we  don't  need  to do that, of course, silly--not at first. I just mean it as an example of how free we ought to be. Of course we wouldn't
sell  it. Heavens, we may be delighted to slink back here in six months! But don't let's plan to, that's what I mean. Oh, Sam, I'm absolutely not
going  to  let  my  life  be over at forty--well, at forty-one, but no one ever takes me for more than thirty-five or even thirty-three. And life
would  be  over  for me if I simply went on forever with the idiotic little activities in this half-baked town! I won't, that's all! You can stay
here  if you insist, but I'm going to take the lovely things that--I have a right to take them, because I understand them! What do I care whether
some  club  of  human, or half-human, tabby-cats in eye-glasses study dietetics or Lithuanian art next year? What do I care whether a pretentious
bunch  of  young millionaire manufacturers have an imitation English polo team? . . . when I could have the real thing, in England! And yet if we
stay here, we'll settle down to doing the same things over and over. We've drained everything that Zenith can give us--yes, and almost everything
that  New  York  and Long Island can give us. And in this beastly country--In Europe, a woman at forty is just getting to the age where important
men  take  a  serious  interest in her. But here, she's a grandmother. The flappers think I'm as venerable as the bishop's wife. And they MAKE me
old,  with  their  confounded  respectfulness--and  their  CHARMING rejoicing when I go home from a dance early--I who can dance better, yes, and
longer, than any of them--"

"Now, now!"

"Well,  I  can! And so could you, if you didn't let business sap every single ounce of energy you have! But at the same time--I only have five or
ten  more years to continue being young in. It's the derniere cartouche. And I won't waste it. Can't you understand? Can't you understand? I mean
it, desperately! I'm begging for life--no, I'm not!--I'm demanding it! And that means something more than a polite little Cook's trip to Europe!"

"But  see  here now! Do you actually mean to tell me, Fran, that you think that just moving from Zenith to Paris is going to change everything in
your life and make you a kid again? Don't you realize that probably most people in Paris are about like most people here, or anywhere else?"

"They aren't, but even if they were--"

"What do you expect out of Europe? A lot of culture?"

"No!  'Culture!'  I  loathe the word, I loathe the people who use it! I certainly do not intend to collect the names of a lot of painters--and of
soups--and  come  back  and air them. Heavens, it isn't just Europe! We may not stay there at all. It's being free to wander wherever we like, as
long  as we like, or to settle down and become part of some community or some set if we like, and not feel that we have a duty to come back here.
Oh, I could love you so much more if we weren't a pair of old horses in a treadmill!"

They sailed for Southampton in February, three weeks after Emily's wedding.

Sam was absorbed in completing the Revelation Company transfer, and in answering Fran when she complained, "Oh, work's become a disease with you!
You  go  on  with it when there's no need. Let the underlings finish up. Dear, it's because I do love you that--Do you think you'll ever learn to
enjoy leisure, to enjoy just being yourself and not an office? You're not going to make me feel guilty for having dragged you away, are you?"

"By  God,  I'll  enjoy  life if it kills me--and it probably will!" he grumbled. "You've got to give me time. I've started this business of being
'free'  about  thirty-five  years  too  late.  I'm  a  good  citizen.  I've learned that Life is real and Life is earnest and the presidency of a
corporation is its goal. What would I be doing with anything so degenerate as enjoying myself?"



CHAPTER 5


The S. S. Ultima, thirty-two thousand tons burden, was four hours out of New York. As the winter twilight glowered on the tangle of gloomy waves,
Samuel  Dodsworth  was  aware of the domination of the sea, of the insignificance of the great ship and all mankind. He felt lost in the round of
ocean,  one  universal  gray except for a golden gash on the western horizon. His only voyaging had been on lakes, or on the New York ferries. He
felt  uneasy as he stood at the after rail and saw how the rearing mass of the sea loomed over the ship and threatened it when the stern dipped--
down,  unbelievably  down, as though she were sinking. But he felt resolute again, strong and very happy, as he swung about the deck. He had been
sickish  only  for the first hour. The wind filled his chest, exhilarated him. Only now, the messy details of packing and farewells over, and the
artificially  prolonged  waving  to  friends  on the dock endured, did he feel that he was actually delivered from duty, actually going--going to
strange-colored, exciting places, to do unknown and heroic things.

He hummed (for Kipling meant something to Sam Dodsworth which no Shelley could, nor Dante)--he hummed "The Gipsy Trail":


Follow the Romany patteran North where the blue bergs sail, And the bows are gray with the frozen spray, And the masts are shod with mail. Follow
the  Romany patteran West to the sinking sun, Till the junk-sails lift through the houseless drift, And the East and the West are one. Follow the
Romany patteran East where the silence broods By a purple wave on an opal beach In the hush of the Mahim woods.


"Free!" he muttered.

He  stopped  abruptly  by  the line of windows enclosing the music-room, forward on the promenade deck, as he fumbled for the memory of the first
time he had ever sung "The Gipsy Trail."

It  must  have  been when the poem was first set to music. Anyway, Fran and he had been comparatively poor. The money that old Herman Voelker had
lent  them  had gone into the business. (A sudden, meaningless spatter of snow, out on that cold sea. How serene the lights in the music room! He
began  to  feel  the  gallant  security of the ship, his enduring home.) Yes, it was when they had gone off on a vacation--no chauffeur then, nor
suites at the best hotels, but Sam driving all day in their shabby Revelation, with sleep in an earth-scented, wind-stirred tent. They had driven
West--west,  two  thousand miles toward the sunset, till it seemed they must indeed come on the Pacific and junk-sails lifting against the misted
sun. They had no responsibilities of position. Together they chanted "The Gipsy Trail," vowing that some day they would wander together--

And they were doing it!

Such  exultation  filled  him,  such overwhelming tenderness, that he wanted to dash down to their cabin and assure himself that he still had the
magic  of  Fran's  companionship.  But  he  remembered with what irritable efficiency she had been unpacking. He had been married for over twenty
years. He stayed on deck.



He  explored  the  steamer. It was to him, the mechanic, the most sure and impressive mechanism he had ever seen; more satisfying than a Rolls, a
Delauney-Belleville,  which  to  him  had  been  the  equivalents  of a Velasquez. He marveled at the authoritative steadiness with which the bow
mastered the waves; at the powerful sweep of the lines of the deck and the trim stowing of cordage. He admired the first officer, casually pacing
the  bridge.  He  wondered  that  in  this craft which was, after all, but a floating iron egg-shell, there should be the roseate music room, the
smoking-room  with  its  Tudor  fireplace--solid  and  terrestrial  as a castle--and the swimming-pool, green-lighted water washing beneath Roman
pillars.  He climbed to the boat deck, and some never realized desire for sea-faring was satisfied as he looked along the sweep of gangways, past
the huge lifeboats, the ventilators like giant saxophones, past the lofty funnels serenely dribbling black woolly smoke, to the forward mast. The
snow-gusts  along  the deck, the mysteriousness of this new world but half seen in the frosty lights, only stimulated him. He shivered and turned
up  his collar, but he was pricked to imaginativeness, standing outside the wireless room, by the crackle of messages springing across bleak air-
roads ocean-bounded to bright snug cities on distant plains.

"I'm at sea!"



He  tramped down to tell Fran--he was not quite sure what it was that he wanted to tell her, save that steamers were very fine things indeed, and
that ahead of them, in the murk of the horizon, they could see the lanes of England.

She,  in  their  cabin  with  its twin brass beds, its finicking imitations of gray-blue French prints on the paneled walls, was amid a litter of
shaken-out  frocks,  heaps  of  shoes,  dressing  gowns, Coty powder, three gift copies of "The Perennial Bachelor," binoculars, steamer letters,
steamer  telegrams,  the  candy  and  the  Charles  &  Company baskets of overgrown fruit and tiny conserves with which they were to help out the
steamer's  scanty seven meals a day, his dress-shirts (of which he was to, and certainly would not, put on a fresh one every evening), and French
novels (which she was to, and certainly wouldn't, read in a stately, aloof, genteel manner every day on deck).

"It's  terrible!"  she  lamented.  "I'll get things put away just about in time for landing. . . . Oh, here's a wireless from Emily, the darling,
from California. Harry and she seem to be standing the honeymoon about as well as most victims."

"Chuck  the  stuff.  Come  out on deck. I love this ship. It's so--Man certainly has put it over Nature for once! I think I could've built ships!
Come out and see it."

"You do sound happy. I'm glad. But I must unpack. You skip along--"

It  was  not  often,  these  years,  that  he was kittenish, but now he picked her up, while she kicked and laughed, he lifted her over a pile of
sweaters  and  tennis  shoes  and  bathing-suits  and  skates,  kissed  her,  and shouted, "Come on! It's our own honeymoon! Eloping! Have I ever
remembered  to  tell you that I adore you? Come up and see some ocean with me. There's an awful lot of ocean around this ship. . . . Oh, damn the
unpacking!"

He  sounded  masterful,  but it was always a satisfaction, when he was masterful, to have her consent to be mastered. He was pleased now when she
stopped being efficient about this business of enjoying life, and consented to do something for no reason except that it was agreeable.

In  her  shaggy Burberry, color of a dead maple leaf, and her orange tam o' shanter, she suggested autumn days and brown uplands. She was a girl;
certainly  no  mother  of  a  married daughter. He was cumbersomely proud of her, of the glances which the men passengers snatched at her as they
swung round the deck.

"Funny  how  it  comes over a fellow suddenly--I mean--this is almost the first time we've ever really started out like lovers--no job to call us
back.  You  were  dead right, Fran--done enough work--now we'll live! Together--always! But I'll have so much to learn, to keep up with you. You,
and Europe! Hell, I'm so sentimental! D'you mind? Just come out of state prison! Did twenty years!"

Round and round the deck. The long stretch on the starboard side, filthy with deck chairs, with rug-wadded passengers turning a pale green as the
sea rose, with wind-ruffled magazines, cups left from teatime, and children racing with toy carts. The narrow passage aft, where the wind swooped
on  them, pushing them back, and the steamer dipped so that they had to labor up-hill, bending forward, their limbs of lead. But, as they toiled,
a  glimpse  of  ship  mysteries  that were stirring to land-bound imaginations. They looked down into a hatchway--some one said there were half a
dozen  Brazilian  cougars being shipped down there--and along a dizzy aerial gangway to the after deck and the wheelhouse and a lone light in the
weaving darkness. They saw the last glimmer of the streaky wake stretching back to New York.

Then,  blown  round  the  corner,  released  from climbing upward, a dash along the cold port side, blessedly free of steamer chairs and of lardy
staring.  Swinging  at five miles an hour. The door of the smoking-room, with a whiff of tobacco smoke, a pleasant reek of beer, a sound of vocal
Americans. The place where the deck widened into an alcove--thick walls of steel, dotted with lines of rivets smeared with thick white paint--and
the door of the stewards' pantry from which, in the afternoon, came innumerable sandwiches and cakes and cups and pots of tea. The double door to
the  main  stairway, where, somehow, a stewardess in uniform was always talking to a steward. The steel-gripped windows of the music room, with a
glimpse  of  unhappy  young-old  women, accompanying their mothers abroad, sitting flapping through magazines. Where the deck was unenclosed, the
yellow  scoured  rail  and  the  white  stanchions, bright in the deck light, brighter against the dark coil of sea. Always before them, the long
straight lines of the decking planks, rigid as bars of music, divided by seams of glistening tar. Deck--ship--at sea!

Then  forward,  and the people along the rail--bold voyagers facing the midwinter Atlantic through glass windows--honeymooners quickly unclasping
as the pestiferous deck-circlers passed--aged and sage gentlemen commenting on the inferiority of the steerage passengers who, on the deck below,
altogether  innocent  of  being  condescendingly observed by the gentry-by-right-of-passage-money, jigged beside a tarpaulin-covered hatch to the
pumping music of an accordion, and blew blithely on frosted fingers.

And  round  all  over again, walking faster, turning from casual pedestrians into competitors in the ocean marathon. Faster. Cutting corners more
sharply. Superior to thrusting wind, to tilting deck. Gaining on that lone, lean, athletic girl, and passing her. . . .

"That's  the  way  to  walk! Say, Fran, I wonder if sometime we couldn't get away from hotels and sort of take a walking-trip along the Riviera--
interesting, I should think. . . . Darling!"

Gaining  on  but never quite passing that monocle-flashing, tweed-coated man whom they detested on sight and who, within three days, was to prove
the simplest and heartiest of acquaintances.

A racing view of all their companions of the voyage, their fellow-citizens in this brave village amid the desert of waters: strangers to be hated
on  sight,  to be snubbed lest they snub first, yet presently to be known better and better loved and longer remembered than neighbors seen for a
lifetime on the cautious land.

Their  permanent  home,  for  a  week; to become more familiar, thanks to the accelerated sensitiveness which is the one blessing of travel, than
rooms paced for years. Every stippling of soot on the lifeboats, every chair in the smoking-room, every table along one's own aisle in the dining
salon, to be noted and recalled, in an exhilarated and heightened observation.

"I  do feel awfully well," said Sam, and Fran: "So do I. So long since we've walked together like this! And we'll keep it up; we won't get caught
by  people.  But  I  must  arise  now and go to Innisfree and finish the unpacking of the nine bean rows oh WHY did I bring so many clothes! Till
dressing-time--MY DEAR!"



He  was  first  dressed  for  dinner. She had decided, after rather a lot of conversation about it, that the belief that our better people do not
dress  for  dinner  on  the  first  night out was a superstition. He sauntered up to the smoking-room for his first cocktail aboard, feeling very
glossy  and  handsome  and  much-traveled.  Then  he  was  feeling  very  lonely, for the smoking-room was filled with amiable-looking people who
apparently all knew one another. And he knew nobody aboard save Fran.

"That's  the  one  trouble.  I'm  going to miss Tub and Doc Hazzard and the rest horribly," he brooded. "I wish they were along! Then it would be
about perfect."

He was occupying an alcove with a semi-circular leather settee, before a massy table. The room was crowded, and a square-rigged Englishman, blown
into the room with a damp whiff of sea air, stopped at Sam's table asking abruptly, "Mind if I sit here?"

The Englishman ordered his cocktail with competence:

"Now  be  very careful about this, steward. I want half Booth gin and half French vermouth, and just four drops of orange bitters, and no Italian
vermouth,  remember, no Italian vermouth." As the Englishman gulped his drink, Sam enjoyed hating him. The man was perfectly expressionless, like
a square-headed wooden idol, colored like an idol of cedar wood. "Supercilious as the devil. Never would be friendly, not till he'd known you ten
years.  Well, he needn't worry! I'm not going to speak to him! Curious how an Englishman like that can make you feel that you're small and skinny
and your tie's badly tied without even looking at you! Well, he--"

The Englishman spoke, curtly:

"Decent weather, for a February crossing."

"Is it? I don't really know. Never crossed before."

"Really?"

"You've crossed often?"

"Oh,  perhaps  twenty  times. I was with the British War Mission during the late argument. They were always chasing me across. Lockert's my name.
I'm growing cocoa down in British Guiana now. Hot there! Going to stay in London?"

"I think so, for a while. I'm on an indefinite vacation."

Sam  had  the  American  yearning  to become acquainted, to tell all about his achievements, not as boasting but to establish himself as a worthy
fellow.

"I've  been  manufacturing  motor  cars--the  Revelation--thought it was about time to quit and find out what the world was like. Dodsworth is my
name."

"Pleased  to  meet you." (Like most Europeans, Lockert believed that all Americans of all classes always said "Pleased to meet you," and expected
so  to  be greeted in turn.) "Revelation? Jolly good car. Had one in Kent. My cousin--live with him when I'm home--bouncing old retired general--
he's dotty over motors. Roars around on a shocking old motor bike--mustache and dignity flying in the morning breeze--atrocious bills for all the
geese and curates he runs over. He's insanely pro-American--am myself, except for your appalling ice water. Have another cocktail?"

In  twenty  minutes,  Sam and Major Clyde Lockert had agreed that the "labor turnover" was too high, that driving by night into the brilliance of
headlights was undesirable, that Bobby Jones was a player of golf, and that they themselves were men of the world and cheery companions.

"I'll meet lots of people. And I like this ship. This is the greatest day of my life--next to my marriage, of course," Sam gloated, as the second
dinner gong flooded the ship with waves of hysterical sound and he marched out to rouse Fran from her mysterious activities.

There was awaiting him in his cabin a wireless from Tub Pearson:


BON  VOYAGE  STOP LONDON SURE SEE MY NEPHEW JACK STARLING AMERICAN EMBASSY LIVING GEORGIAN HOUSE STOP DONT RAISE ON BOBTAILED STRAIGHTS WISH WITH
YOU TUB.


He wondered about introducing Major Lockert to Fran.

He  was  never  able  to  guess  how  she would receive the people whom he found in the alley and proudly dragged in to her. Business men whom he
regarded  as  upstanding  and vigorous, she often pronounced dull; European visitors whom he found elegant, she was likely to call "not quite the
real  thing";  and  men  whom he had doubtfully presented to her as worthy but rather mutton-headed, she had been known to consider fine and very
sensitive.  And for all her theoretical desire to make their house a refuge for him and for whomever he liked to invite, she had never learned to
keep  her opinions of people to herself. When she was bored by callers, she would beg "Do you mind if I run up to bed now--such a headache," with
a bright friendliness which fooled no one save herself, and which left their guests chilled and awkward.

Would she find Lockert heavy?

While they sat in the music room over after-dinner coffee, with a dance beginning in the cleared space, Lockert came ambling up to them.

"Mr. Lockert--my wife," Sam mumbled.

Lockert's  stolidity  did  not  change  as  he  bowed, as he sat down in answer to a faint invitation, but Sam noted that his pale blue eyes came
quickly alive and searched Fran with approval. . . . Fran's lovely pallor, in a robe de style such as only her slenderness could bear.

Sam  settled back with his cigar and let them talk. To him, always, the best talk was no brilliance of his own, but conversation that amused Fran
and drew her out of her silken sulkiness.

"You've been long in America, Mr. Lockert?"

"Not  this  time.  I've been living in British Guiana--plantation--no soda for your whisky, and always the chance of finding a snake curled up in
your chair on the verandah--nice big snakes, all striped, very handsome and friendly--don't seem to get used to 'em."

Lockert  spoke  to  her  not  with such impersonal friendliness as he had for Sam, not with the bored dutifulness which most men in Zenith showed
toward  any woman over a flapperish eighteen, but a concentration, an eagerness in the presence of attractive women, an authentic need for women,
which  seemed  to flatter Fran and to rouse her, yet make her timid. She had first looked at Lockert with metallic courtesy. "Here was another of
those ponderous business men that Sam was always dragging around." Now she concentrated on him, she forgot Sam, and murmured youthfully:

"It  sounds  dreadful.  And  yet so exciting! I think I should be glad of a nice striped snake, for a change! I'm terribly fed up with the sound,
safe American cities where you never find anything in your chair more thrilling than the morning paper. I think I'll go look for snakes!"

"Are you going East?"

"Don't know. Isn't it nice! No plans beyond London."

"You'll stay in London a bit?"

"Yes, if there aren't too many Americans there. Why IS it that the travelling American is such a dreadful person? Look at those ghastly people at
that  second  table  there--no,  just  beyond  the  pillar--father  with  horn-rimmed  spectacles, certain to be talking about either Coolidge or
Prohibition--earnest  mother  in  home-made  frock out to hunt down Culture and terribly grim about it--daughter with a voice like a file. Why IS
it?"

"And why is it that you Americans, the nice ones, are so much more snobbish than the English?"

She  gasped, and Sam awaited a thunderbolt, which did not come. Lockert was calm and agreeable, and she astonishingly bent to his domination with
a puzzled: "Are we, really?"

"Appallingly!  I  know  only  two  classes  of  people  who  hate  their own race--or tribe or nation or whatever you care to call it--who travel
principally  to  get  away  from  their own people, who never speak of them except with loathing, who are pleased not to be taken as belonging to
them. That is, the Americans and the Jews!"

"Oh, come now, that's idiotic! I'm as proud of being--No! That's so. Partly. You're right. Why is it?"

"I suppose it's because your boosters go so much to the other extreme, talking about 'God's Country'"

"But that expression is never used any more."

"It  isn't? Anyway: 'greatest country on earth' and 'we won the war.' And your ghastly city-boosting tours and Elks' conventions--people like you
hate this bellowing. And then I do think the English have, as you would say, 'put something over on you'--"

"I've NEVER used the phrase!"

"--by  sitting back and quietly assuming that we're the noblest and rightest people on earth. And if any man or any nation has the courage or the
magnificent  egotism to do that long enough, almost every one will accept it from him. Oh, the English are essentially more insufferable than the
Americans--"

"But not so noisy about it," mused Fran.

Sam was not at all sure that he liked this discussion.



"Perhaps  not,"  said  Lockert;  "though  if there's anything noisier than the small even voice with which an Englishman can murmur, 'Don't be so
noisy,  my  dear  fellow--!' Physically, it may carry only a yard, but spiritually it rings clear up through the Heavens! And I'll be hearing it,
now  that  I've become a Colownial. Even my cousin--I was speaking to your husband about him--absolute fanatic about motor transport--I'm to stay
with him in Kent. And he'll be pleasant to me, and gently rebuking--And he's rather a decent old thing--General Herndon."

"General LORD Herndon? Of the Italian drive?" said Fran.

"Yes. You see, my revered great-grandfather did so well out of cotton that he was rewarded with a peerage."

"And you're so proud of it! That's why you enjoy your mock humility. You had a quite American thrill in admitting that your cousin is a lordship.
It's  bunk--I  mean,  it's  nonsense,  the  British assertion that only Americans take titles seriously. You have as much satisfaction out of not
calling your cousin 'Lord' as--"

"As any charming American woman would out of calling him 'Lord'!"

She  seemed  helpless  against  Lockert's bland impertinence; she seemed to enjoy being bullied; she admitted, "Yes, perhaps," and they smiled at
each other.

"But  seriously,"  said  Lockert, "you'll be more English than I am, after you've lived there a year. I've knocked about so much in South America
and Colorado and Ceylon that I'm merely a tramp. Jungle rat."

"You really think so--that I'll become English?" She was unguardedly frank, she the ever-guarded.

"Quite. . . . I say, may I have this dance?"

Lockert,  for all his squareness--he was as solid and ungraceful-looking as his favorite mutton-chop--danced easily. Sam drooped in his chair and
watched them.

"Nice she has somebody to play with already," he insisted.

And  within  three days she had a dozen men to "play with," to dance and argue with, and race with around the deck. But always it was Lockert who
assumed  that  he  was her patron, who looked over her new acquaintances one by one, and was not at all shy about giving his verdict on them. She
became  helplessly  angry at his assumptions, and he apologized so affably and so insincerely that she enjoyed quarreling with him for hours at a
time,  snuggled in a steamer robe on deck. And when Lockert and she found that they were both devoted to dogs and they became learned about wire-
haired terriers, Sam leaned back listening as though she were his clever daughter.

Between  times she was gayer with him and more affectionate than she had been for years; and day by day the casualness suitable to a manufacturer
like Sam broke down into surprising, uncharted emotions.



CHAPTER 6


On  their  last  day out--they were due in Southampton at noon, tomorrow--there was on the Ultima all the kindly excitement, all the anticipation
and laughter, of the day before Christmas. When the Dodsworths came up to the smoking-room for their cocktail before dinner they were welcomed by
the dozen people whom Lockert, the mixer of the voyage, had attracted to the round table in the center of the room.

What  delightful  people!  Sam  glowed;  what  a pleasure to travel with them: Lockert, the stolidly loquacious English adventurer; the jolly and
vulgar  little  Jewish  millinery buyer from Denver, who was quite the cleverest man aboard; Lechintsky, the pianist; Colonel Endersley, American
military  attache  at  Constantinople;  Sally O'Leary, the satiny movie actress, whose real name was Gwendolyn Alcovar; kindly and ruminating old
Professor Deakins, the Assyriologist; Max Ristad, the Norwegian aviator; Pierce Pattison, the New York banker.

"Come  on, you're late!" and "Sit down here; I've had mine," and "We missed you!" they cried. They were as friendly as a college reunion, as free
of jealousy, and just as undiscriminating.

The Jewish buyer had two new anecdotes (against his own race, naturally), and they flowed down to dinner in a group.

The Captain's Dinner on the Ultima occurred on the last night of the voyage, and much was made of it. The dining salon was draped in scarlet, the
stewards  were  in  red  hunting-coats,  champagne  was  served  at the expense of the Line. Even prohibitionists were betrayed into smiles which
indicated  that they wanted to keep up the friendships of this halcyon week. Toasts were drunk from table to table, with many bows, and the large
Seattle  contractor,  who  always  overdid  everything, threw confetti, and tonight no one minded his alcoholic philanthropy. The Comtesse de Val
Montique,  who  had  been born in Chicago, who owned nine million dollars, two chateaux, and part of a beautifully varnished husband, who crossed
the  ocean regularly twice a year and was so aristocratic that she had for friends only her servants, was moved tonight to look amiable as people
passed  her  table. And the old captain, his beard like a whisk broom, went about the room patting shoulders and chuckling, "You cross again with
Papa, eh?"



Sam was raised to a quivering sensitiveness toward all of them. He was not drunk, certainly, but after two cocktails, half a bottle of champagne,
and a cognac or two, he was released from his customary caution, his habitual concentration on his own affairs. He was excited by their merriment
at first; then it seemed to him pitiful that all of them, and he himself, should so rarely cease thus their indignant assertion of the importance
of  their  own  little  offices  and homes and learnings, and let themselves rejoice in friendliness. They seemed to him like children, excitedly
playing now, but soon to be caught by weary maturity. He felt a little the lacrimae rerum of the whole world. He wanted to weep over the pride of
the  waiters  as--the one moment on the voyage when they were important and beautiful and to be noticed--they bore in the platters of flaming ice
cream.  He  wanted  to weep over the bedraggled small-town bride who for the moment forgot that she had not found honeymooning quite so glorious,
nor the sea so restful. And he saw as pitiful the fact that Fran expected to find youth again merely by changing skies.

All the while he looked as little sentimental as possible, the large, grave man plodding through the courses.



That  was the great dance of the trip, with Japanese lanterns making the starboard deck curiously like the verandah of the Kennepoose Canoe Club,
years  and  years ago, when he had found Fran. But he did not explain it to her. He couldn't. He said, "I adore you! You look mighty well in that
gold  and ivory dress." He had, indeed, little chance for sentimental explanations. No flapper aboard had more partners than Fran; certainly none
danced  so smoothly. Lockert was proprietorially about her, always, and to Sam he snapped, "Want to have you at Lord Herndon's for a week-end, if
you'll come, and I'd like to show you a bit of London. We'll dine at Claridge's."

Sam  was  not  at all sure that Lockert would do anything of the kind; he suspected that Lockert could forget people as quickly as he picked them
up;  yet  it gave him a feeling of belonging a little to England. And there was Tub Pearson's nephew at the American Embassy, and of course Hurd,
the manager of the London Revelation agency. He belonged!

He was emboldened to ask for a dance with Sally O'Leary, the movie queen who had made seduction famous.

"I'm  not  much good at this," he grumbled, as the steamer rolled and they struggled to dance up-hill. "You ought to be dancing with one of these
young fellows."

"Don't be silly! You're a lovely partner. You're a man, not one of these gigolos, or whatever the damn' word is. If you didn't have such a lovely
wife,  I'd  probably  lay  my head on your lovely big chest and ask you to go out to Hollywood and kill a coupla lovely beauty-parlor cowboys for
me!"

He  was  pleased to believe that she meant it. His heightened sensitiveness, his wistful perception of the loneliness of the world, was gone in a
boisterous  well-being.  When  he  danced  with Fran and she dutifully pointed out his roughness, he laughed. Always she had a genius for keeping
herself  superior to him by just the right comment on his clumsiness, the most delicate and needle-pointed comparison of him with defter men. But
tonight  he  chuckled,  "I'm no Nijinsky, but I'm enjoying myself so much that even you can't make me mad!" He whirled her again, mercilessly; he
slid gloatingly down the long deck, and marched her back to their table.

And,  when  Fran  assured him they needed no more wine, there were joyful invasions of the smoking-room, where tablefuls of the shamelessly happy
greeted him, "Come sit down!"

They liked him! He was Somebody! Not just as the president of the Revelation but in himself, in whatever surroundings!

He  did  sit  down;  he wandered from table to table in an ecstasy of friendliness . . . which became a little blurred, a little dizzy. . . . But
they  were the best company he'd ever known, everybody on board, all of 'em. . . . But he'd better watch out; he was slightly lit. . . . But they
were the BEST folks--

He  went out on deck, to clear his head; he swayed up to the boat deck. Then he stood fixed, and all his boisterousness vanished in a high, thin,
clear ecstasy.

On  the  horizon  was a light, stationary, ON LAND, after these days of shifting waters and sliding hulls. He waited to be certain. Yes! It was a
lighthouse,  swinging its blade of flame. They had done it, they had fulfilled the adventure, they had found their way across the blind immensity
and,  the  barren  sea  miles  over, they had come home to England. He did not know (he never knew) whether the light was on Bishop's Rock or the
English  mainland,  but  his  released imagination saw the murkiness to northward there as England itself. Mother England! Land of his ancestors;
land  of  the  only kings who, to an American schoolboy, had been genuine monarchs--Charles I and Henry VIII and Victoria; not a lot of confusing
French  and  German  rulers.  Land  where  still,  for the never quite matured Sammy Dodsworth, Coeur de Lion went riding, the Noir Faineant went
riding,  to  rescue  Ivanhoe, where Oliver Twist still crept through evil alleys, where Falstaff's belly-laugh discommoded the godly, where Uncle
Ponderevo  puffed  and  mixed, where Jude wavered by dusk across the moorland, where Old Jolyon sat with quiet eyes, in immortality more enduring
than  human  life. And his own people--he had lost track of them, but he had far-off cousins in Wiltshire, in Durham. And all of them there--in a
motor  boat  he  could  be ashore in half an hour! Perhaps there was a town just off there--He saw it, from pictures in Punch and the Illustrated
London News, from Cruikshank illustrations of his childhood.

A  seaside town: a crescent of flat-faced houses, the brass-sheathed door of a select pub and, countrywards, a governess-cart creeping among high
hedges to a village green, a chalky hill with Roman earthworks up to which panted the bookish vicar beside a white-mustached ex-proconsul who had
ruled jungles and maharajahs and lost temples where peacocks screamed.

Mother England! Home!



He  dashed  down  to  Fran. He had to share it with her. For all his training in providing suitable company for her and then not interrupting his
betters,  he burst through her confidences as Lockert and she stood aloof from the dance. He seized her shoulder and rumbled, "Light ahead! We're
there! Come up on the top deck. Oh, hell, never MIND a coat! Just a second, to see it!"

His  insistence  bore  Fran  away,  and  with  her  alone,  unchaperoned by that delightful Major Lockert, he stood huddled by a lifeboat, in his
shirtsleeves, his dress coat around her, looking at the cheery wink of the light that welcomed them.

They had full five minutes of romancing and of tenderness before Lockert came along, placidly bumbling that they would catch cold . . . that they
would  find  Kent an estimable county . . . that Dodsworth must never make the mistake of ordering his street-boots and his riding-boots from the
same maker.



The  smell  of  London  is  a foggy smell, a sooty smell, a coal-fire smell, yet to certain wanderers it is more exhilarating, more suggestive of
greatness  and of stirring life, than springtime hillsides or the chill sweetness of autumnal nights; and that unmistakable smell, which men long
for  in  rotting  perfumes  along  the  Orinoco, in the greasy reek of South Chicago, in the hot odor of dusty earth among locust-buzzing Alberta
wheatfields,  that  luring  breath  of  the  dark  giant  among  cities, reaches halfway to Southampton to greet the traveler. Sam sniffed at it,
uneasily,  restlessly,  while he considered how strange was the British fashion of having railway compartments instead of an undivided car with a
nice  long  aisle  along  which  you  could  observe  ankles,  magazines,  Rotary buttons, clerical collars, and all the details that made travel
interesting.

And  the  strangeness of having framed pictures of scenery behind the seats; of having hand straps--the embroidered silk covering so rough to the
finger  tips,  the  leather  inside  so  smooth  and  cool--beside the doors. And the greater strangeness of admitting that these seats were more
comfortable  than  the  flinty  Pullman  chairs  of  America. And of seeing outside, in the watery February sunshine, not snow-curdled fields but
springtime greenness; pollarded willows and thatched roofs and half-timbered facades--

Just like in the pictures! England!

Like  most  people  who  have  never  traveled abroad, Sam had not emotionally believed that these "foreign scenes" veritably existed; that human
beings  really could live in environments so different from the front yards of Zenith suburbs; that Europe was anything save a fetching myth like
the  Venusberg. But finding it actually visible, he gave himself up to grasping it as enthusiastically as, these many years, he had given himself
to grinding out motor cars.



CHAPTER 7


Not  the  charge  and  roaring  of the huge red busses, not the glimpse of Westminster's towers beside the Thames, not the sight of the pale tall
houses  of  Carlton  House  Terrace, so much delighted Sam and proved to him that incredibly he was in London as did a milk cart on its afternoon
delivery--that absurd little cart, drawn by a pony, with the one big brassy milk container, instead of a truck filled with precise bottles.

"That certainly is old-fashioned!" he muttered in the taxicab, greatly content.

They  planned  to  stay  at  the  Berkeley, but when Sam stood at the booking-desk, making himself as large and impassive and traveled-looking as
possible, and said casually, "I'd like a suite," the clerk remarked, "Very sorry, sir--full up."

"But we wirelessed for reservations!" snapped Fran.

"Come to think of it, I forgot all about sending the radio," said Sam, looking apologetically at the clerk, apologizing for the rudeness of Fran,
his child.

She breathed quickly, angrily, but never yet had she quarreled with him in public.

"You might try the Savoy, sir. Or the Ritz--just across Piccadilly," the clerk suggested.

They drooped back to the taxicab waiting with their luggage, feeling unwelcome, and when they were safely inside the car, she opened up:

"I  do think you might have remembered to send that wireless, considering that you had absolutely nothing else to do aboard--except drink! When I
did  all  the packing and--Sam, do you ever realize that it really wouldn't injure your titanic industrial mind if you were occasionally just the
least little bit thoughtful toward me, if you didn't leave absolutely everything about the house and traveling for me to do? I don't think it was
very nice of you! And I'm so tired, after the customs and--"

"Hell! I suppose you got the tickets to Europe! I suppose you got our passports--"

"No. Your secretary did! I'm afraid you don't get any vast credit for that, my dear man!"

That  was  all  the  family scene for which they had time before they disembarked at the Ritz, but Fran was able to keep up quite a high level of
martyrdom  and  bad  temper, for the Ritz was nearly full, also, and they could not have a suite till the next day. Tonight, Fran had to endure a
mere double bedroom with a private bath.

"I  suppose,"  she  stormed,  "that I'm expected to spend my entire time in London packing and unpacking and moving and unpacking all over again!
This awful room! Oh, I do think you might have remembered--"

All  the  gaiety was gone from Sam's large face. He held her arm, painfully, and growled, "Now that'll do! You ought to be ashamed of yourself! I
always deny it, even to you, but you CAN be the nagging wife! Just the kind you hate! We've never had a better room than this, and tomorrow we'll
have  a suite, and you needn't unpack anything besides a toothbrush this evening--we needn't dress for dinner. You make me sick when you get this
suffering,  abused,  tragedy  fit. I know it's because you're tired and jumpy, but can't you ever be tired and jumpy without insisting that every
one around you be the same way?"

"Is  it  necessary for you to shout at me, as a proof of YOUR calmness--your superb masculine calmness--and is it necessary to break my arm? I am
not  a nagger! I've never nagged you! But the fact that you, who are so fond of talking about yourself as the great executive who never forgets a
detail--"

"Never say anything of the kind!"

"--could forget to send that wireless, and then you're too self-satisfied even to be sorry about it--"

"Fran!"  His  arm  circled her; he led her to the window. "Look down there! Piccadilly! London! I've always wanted to see it, just as much as you
have. Are we going to quarrel now? Do you remember the very first evening I met you, after you'd come back from Europe, and I said we'd come here
together? And we have. Togeth--Oh, I guess I sound sentimental, but to be here in England, where all our people came from, with you--"

"I'm sorry. I was naughty. I'm sorry." Then she laughed. "Only my people didn't come from here! My revered ancestors galloped around the Bavarian
mountains in short green pants, and yodeled, and undoubtedly they fought your ancestors on all possible occasions!"

But  her  laughter was not very convincing; her restoration to happiness not complete. She said, while she was unpacking her smaller bag, gliding
in and out of the bathroom--she said, in rather a lonely, discouraged way:

"Same  time,  my dear, you aren't always thoughtful about me. American husbands never are. You're no worse than the rest, but you're just as bad.
You  think  of  nothing beyond business and golf. It never occurs to you that a woman, poor idiot, is lots more pleased when you remember to send
her  flowers,  or  when  you  'phone  to her at odd hours, just to say you love her, than she would be by a new motor car. Please don't think I'm
nagging--maybe  I was before, but I'm not now, really! I do so want us to be happy together! And now that you don't have to think about business,
don't you think it might be nice to get acquainted with me? I'm really quite a nice person!"

"Nice? Oh, Lord!"

She was cheerfuller, after their long kiss, and he--he became very busy trying to be a thoughtful husband.

And she agreed that it was jolly that they needn't dress for dinner, and then she unpacked their evening clothes.



It  was  toward evening; he must make her first night in London exciting; and, like most American husbands, he assumed that the best way to do it
was to invite some one, if possible some one a little younger and livelier than himself, to join them.

Major Lockert?

Oh, damn Major Lockert!

They'd  seen  too  much  of  him  on the ship--and the patronizing way in which he'd ambled into their compartment on the boat train and thrust a
Graphic and a Tatler on them--And the way he'd explained that you mustn't confuse a florin and a half-crown--

Still,  Lockert  was  younger  than himself--perhaps half a dozen years--and he could gabble about baccarat and Paris-Plage and other things that
Fran seemed to find important--

"Let's get hold of somebody for dinner, honey," he said, "and then maybe we'll take in a show. How about it? Shall I try to get hold of Lockert?"

"Oh no!"

He  was  pleased;  considerably  less  pleased when she went on, "He's been so kind to us, and so helpful, and we mustn't bother him on his first
evening home. What about this young Starling, Tub's nevvy, at the American Embassy?"

"We'll try him."

The Embassy was closed, and at his bachelor apartment, Dunger, the porter, explained that Mr. Starling had gone to the Riviera for a fortnight.

"Do you remember any of the people you met here when you came abroad as a kid?" Sam asked.

"No,  not  really.  And  I  haven't  any  relatives here--all in Germany. Hang it, I do think that after all these centuries my family might have
provided me with one respectable English earl as kinsman!"

"What about Hurd, the Revelation agent? I think he came to our house once when he was in Zenith."

"Oh, he--he's a terrible person--absolute roughneck--how you ever happened to send an American like Hurd over here when you might have had a nice
Englishman  as London agent and--Why, don't you remember I asked you not to write him we were coming? I WON'T be the 'president's little lady' to
that awful bunch of back-slapping salesmen!"

"Now Hurd's a mighty good fellow! He's cocky, and I don't suppose he's read a book since he used to look at the lingerie ads in the Sears-Roebuck
catalogue as a kid, but he's a whirlwind at selling, and he tells mighty good stories, and he would know the best restaurants in London."

Softened,  a  bit  motherly--or at least a bit sisterly--she comforted him, "You really would like to see him, wouldn't you? Well then, let's get
him, by all means."

"No, this is your party. I want somebody that you'd like. Plenty of time to see Hurd; go call on him tomorrow, maybe."

"No,  really,  I  think  it would be lovely to have your Mr. Hurd. He wasn't so bad. I was exaggerating. Yes, do call him up--please do! I'd feel
terrible if I felt that I'd kept you from seeing--And perhaps you do owe it to the business. He may have some cables from the U.A.C."

"Well,  all  right.  And  if  I don't get him, how about trying Colonel Enderley and his wife--I thought they were about the nicest people on the
boat, and they may not have a date for tonight. Or that aviator, Ristad?"

"Splendid."

Hurd's office was closed.

Hurd's home address not in the telephone book.

Colonel and Mrs. Enderley not at the Savoy, after all.

Max Ristad not in.

Who else?



How  many  millions of American husbands had sat on the edges of how many millions of hotel beds, from San Francisco to Stockholm, sighing to the
unsympathetic  telephone,  "Oh,  not  in?" ruffling through the telephone book, and again sighing, "Oh, not in?"--looking for playmates for their
handsome wives, while the wives listened blandly and never once cried, "But I don't want any one else! Aren't we two enough?"



A  little  melancholy  at  having  to struggle through their Second Honeymoon unassisted, they dined at the hotel and went to the theater. In the
taxicab,  he  had  a confused timidity--no fear of violence, no sense of threatened death, but a feeling of incompetence in this strange land, of
making  a  fool  of  himself, of being despised by Fran and by these self-assured foreigners; a fear of loneliness; a fear that he might never be
restored  to  the  certainties  of Zenith. He saw his club, the office, the dear imprisonment of home, against the background of London, with its
lines  of  severe  facades, its roaring squares, corners clamorous with newspaper vendors, and a whole nest of streets that irritated him because
they  weren't  reasonable--he  didn't  know where they led! And a tremendous restaurant that looked bigger than any clashing Childs' in New York,
which was annoying in a land where he had expected to find everything as tiny and stiff and unambitious as a Japanese toy garden.

And  the  taxi-driver  hadn't understood his pronunciation--he had had to let the hotel porter give the name of the theater--and what ought he to
tip  the  fellow?  He couldn't ask Fran's advice. He was making up for his negligence about the radiogram for hotel reservations by being brusque
and  competent--a man on whom she could rely, whom she would love the more as she saw his superiority in new surroundings. God, he loved her more
than ever, now that he had the time for it!

And  what  was  that about not confusing a half-crown (let's see: that was fifty cents, almost exactly, wasn't it?) and a florin? Why had Lockert
gone and mixed him all up by cautioning him so much about them? Curse Lockert--nice chap--awfully kind, but treating him as though he were a baby
who  would  be  disgraced  in  decent English society unless he had a genteel guide to tell him what he might wear and what he might say in mixed
society! He'd managed to become president of quite a fair-sized corporation without Lockert's aid, hadn't he!

He felt, at the theater, even more forlorn.

He  did not understand more than two-thirds of what the actors said on the stage. He had been brought up to believe that the English language and
the American language were one, but what could a citizen of Zenith make of "Ohs rath, eastill in labtry"?

What  were  they  talking about? What was the play about? He knew that in America, even in the Midwestern saneness of Zenith, where the factories
and  skyscrapers  were  not  too far from the healing winds across the cornfields, an incredible anarchy had crept into the family life which, he
believed, had been the foundation of American greatness. People that you knew, people like his own cousin, Jerry Loring, after a decent career as
a  banker had taken up with loose girls and had stood for his wife's having a lover without killing the fellow. By God if he, Sam Dodsworth, ever
found HIS wife being too friendly with a man--

No, he probably wouldn't. Not kill them. She had a right to her own way. She was better than he--that slender, shining being, in the golden frock
she  had  insisted  on  digging  out of a wardrobe trunk. She was a divine thing, while he was a clodhopper--and how he'd like to kiss her, if it
weren't  for  shocking  all  these people so chillily calm about him! If conceivably she COULD look at another man, he'd just leave her . . . and
kill himself.

But he must attend to the play, considering that he was being educated, and so expensively.

He concluded that the play was nonsense. In America there was a criminal amount of divorcing and of meriting divorce, but surely that collapse of
all  the decencies was impossible in Old England, the one land that these hundreds of years had upheld the home, the church, the throne! Yet here
on  the  stage,  with  no  one  hissing,  an  English  gentleman  was represented as being the lover of a decent woman, wife of a chemist, and as
protesting against running away with her because then they would be unable to continue having tea and love together at the husband's expense. And
the English audience, apparently good honest people, laughed.

The  queer cold bewilderment crept closer to him in the entr'acte, when he paced the lobby with Fran. The people among whom he was strolling were
so  blankly  indifferent  to  him.  In  Zenith,  he  would  have  been certain to meet acquaintances at the theater; even in New York there was a
probability  of  meeting classmates or automobile men. But here--He felt like a lost dog. He felt as he had on the first day of his Freshman year
in college.

And his evening clothes, he perceived, were all wrong.



They  went  to  bed rather silently, Sam and Fran. He would have given a great deal if she had suggested that they take a steamer back to America
tomorrow.  What,  actually,  she  was thinking, he did not know. She had retired into the mysteriousness which had hidden her essential self ever
since  the night when he had first made love to her, at the Kennepoose Canoe Club. She was pleasant now--too pleasant; she said, too easily, that
she  had  enjoyed  the play; and she said, without saying it, that she was far from him and that he was not to touch her body, her sacred, proud,
passionately  cared-for  body,  save  in  a  fleeting good-night kiss. She seemed as strange to him as the London audience at the theater. It was
inconceivable  that he had lived with her for over twenty years; impossible that she should be the mother of his two children; equally impossible
that it could mean anything to her to travel with him--he so old and tired and aimless, she so fresh and unwrinkled and sure.

Tonight, she wasn't forty-two to his fifty-one; she was thirty to his sixty.

He heard the jesting of Tub Pearson, the friendliness of his chauffeur at home, the respectful questions of his stenographer.

He realized that Fran was also lying awake and that, as quietly as possible, her face rammed into her pillow, she was crying.

And he was afraid to comfort her.



CHAPTER 8


Sam  had  never, for all of Fran's years of urging that it was a genteel and superior custom, been able to get himself to enjoy breakfast in bed.
It seemed messy. Prickly crumbs of toast crept in between the sheets, honey got itself upon his pajamas, and it was impossible to enjoy an honest
cup  of coffee unless he squared up to it at an honest table. He hated to desert her, their first morning in London, but he was hungry. Before he
dared  sneak  down to the restaurant, he fussed about, trying to see to it that she had a proper breakfast. There was a room waiter, very morose,
who  spoke  of  creamed  haddock  and  kippers. Now whatever liberalisms Samuel Dodsworth might have about politics and four-wheel brakes, he was
orthodox  about  American  breakfasts,  and nothing could have sent him more gloomily to his own decent Cream of Wheat than Fran's willingness to
take a thing called a kipper.



No,  said  Fran, after breakfast, she thought she would stay in bed till ten. But he needed exercise, she said. Why, she said, with a smile which
snapped back after using as abruptly as a stretched rubber band, didn't he take a nice walk?

He did take a nice walk.

He  felt friendly with such old-fashioned shops as were left on St. James's Street; brick shopfronts with small-paned windows which had known all
the  beaux and poets of the eighteenth century: a hat-making shop with antiquated toppers and helmets in the window; a wine office with old hand-
blown  bottles.  Beyond  these  relics was a modern window full of beautiful shiny shotguns. He had not believed, somehow, that the English would
have such beautiful shiny shotguns. Things were looking up. England and he would get along together.

But  it  was foggy, a little raw, and in that gray air the aloof and white-faced clubs of Pall Mall depressed him. He was relieved by the sign of
an  American  bank,  the  Guaranty Trust Company, looking very busy and cheerful behind the wide windows. He would go in there and get acquainted
but--Today  he  could  think  of no reason; he had plenty of money, and there had been no time yet for mail to arrive--curse it!--how he'd like a
good breezy letter from Tub Pearson, even a business letter from the U.A.C., full of tricky questions to be answered, anything to assure him that
he  was  some one and meant something, here in this city of traditional, unsmiling stateliness, among these unhurried, well-dressed people who so
thoroughly ignored him.

The next steamer back--

Too late in life, now, to "make new contacts," as they said in Zenith.

He  realized  that  Fran's  thesis,  halfway  convincing to him when they had first planned to go to Europe, her belief that they could make more
passionate  lives merely by running away to a more complex and graceful civilization, had been as sophomoric as the belief of a village girl that
if she could but go off to New York, she would magically become beautiful and clever and happy.

He  had,  for a few days, forgotten that wherever he traveled, he must take his own familiar self along, and that that self would loom up between
him  and  new  skies, however rosy. It was a good self. He liked it, for he had worked with it. Perhaps it could learn things. But would it learn
any  more  here,  where it was chilled by the unfamiliarity, than in his quiet library, in solitary walks, in honestly auditing his life, back in
Zenith? And just what were these new things that Fran confidently expected it to learn?

Pictures? Why talk stupidly about pictures when he could talk intelligently about engines? Languages? If he had nothing to say, what was the good
of  saying  it  in  three  languages?  Manners?  These presumable dukes and dignitaries whom he was passing on Pall Mall might be able to enter a
throne-room more loftily, but he didn't want to enter a throne-room. He'd rather awe Alec Kynance of the U.A.C. than anybody who'd only inherited
the right to be called a king!

No.  He  was  simply  going  to  be  more  of  Sam Dodsworth than he had ever been. He wasn't going to let Europe make him apologetic. Fran would
certainly  get  notions;  want to climb into circles with fancy-dress titles. Oh, Lord, and he was so fond of her that he'd probably back her up!
But he'd fight; he'd try to get her happily home in six months.

So!

He knew now what he'd do--and what he'd make her do!

He became happy again, and considered the Londoners with a friendly, unenvious, almost superior air . . . and discovered that his hat was just as
wrong  as  his evening clothes. It was a good hat, too, and imported; a Borsalino, guaranteed by the Hub Hatters of Zenith to be the smartest hat
in America. But it slanted down in front with too Western and rakish an air.

And,  swearing  that  he'd  let  no  English  passers-by  tell him what HE was going to wear, he stalked toward Piccadilly and into a hat-shop he
remembered  having seen. He'd just glance in there. Certainly they couldn't SELL him anything! English people couldn't sell like Americans! So he
entered the shop and came out with a new gray felt hat for town, a new brown one for the country, a bowler, a silk evening hat, and a cap, and he
was proud of himself for having begun the Europeanization which he wasn't going to begin.



For lunch he invited Hurd--Mr. A. B. Hurd, manager of the London agency of the Revelation Motor Company, an American who had lived in England for
six years.

Fran was fairly amiable about meeting Mr. Hurd, for the hotel management had given her the suite which she had demanded, with a vast sitting-room
in blue and gold.

"I was cross, last evening," she said to Sam. "I felt kind of lonely. I was naughty, and you were so sweet. I'll be good now."

But she couldn't help being a little over-courteous to Hurd when he came in.

Mr.  Hurd  was a round-faced, horn-spectacled, heavy-voiced man who believed that he had become so English in manner and speech that no one could
possibly take him for an American, and who, if he lived in England for fifty years, would never be taken for anything save an American. He looked
so  like  every  fourth  man  to be found at the Zenith Athletic Club that traveling Middlewesterners grew homesick just at sight of him, and the
homesicker  when  they heard his good, meaty, uninflected Iowa voice. He was proud of being able to say that the "goods vans with the motors were
being shunted," though if he was in a hurry he was likely to observe that the "goods vans with the autos were by God being switched."

His  former  awe  of Sam and of the elegance of Fran was lost now in his superiority as one who certainly did know his England and who could help
these untraveled friends.

He bounded into their suite, shook hands, and crowed:

"Well,  by  Jove,  d'you  know you could've doggone near knocked me down with a feather when I found you folks were in town! I say, if you'd just
told  us  you  were coming, we'd've been down to the depot with the town brass band! By golly, d'you know, Chief, I'm almost sorry we're going in
with  the  U.A.C.  It's always been a pleasure to have a straight-shooter like you for boss, and all of us hope that you're going with the U.A.C.
yourself.  Say,  maybe  we aren't shoving over what we got left of the old Series V on the Britishers, too! Now I don't know what plans you folks
have, and the one thing we learn here in England about handling our guests--"

(Sam  wondered if Hurd noticed the sudden rigidity with which Fran received the suggestion that she could ever be considered a guest of Mr. A. B.
Hurd.)

"--is not to bother 'em, like the Americans do, but let 'em alone when they want to be let alone. Now this noon you folks come grab lunch with me
at  the  Savoy Grill--say, I've got the waiters there trained, and I'll tell 'em they're not to treat you like ordinary Americans--they all think
I'm  English; they think I'm kidding 'em when I tell 'em I'm a good Yank and proud of it! And then tomorrow evening I'll get Mrs. Hurd to come in
from  the country--we're living at Beaconsfield, got practically an acre there--and we might all take in a show. You folks will enjoy the English
stage--real  highbrow actors that know how to talk the English language, not a lot of these New York roughnecks. And then maybe next week-end you
might  like  to  come down and stay with us, and I'll drive you around and show you some real English landscape, and you'll meet some of the real
sure'nough  English.  There's a very high-class Englishman living right near us, in fact he's a knight, Sir Wilkie Absolom, the famous solicitor,
that  I know your good lady will fall for hard, Chief. Him and I play golf together right along, and I tell you he's a real democratic guy--he'll
take you in and treat you just like you were English yourselves!"

"I  THINK,  Mr.  Hurd,"  said  Fran,  "that  we'd  better  be  starting off and--" (So sweetly; as to a maid whom she was going to discharge come
Saturday.) "--we can discuss plans on the way. You're very kind to bother with us, but I'm afraid that just these next few days we're going to be
rather  horribly  busy.  We've  already,  unfortunately, accepted a week-end invitation from some old friends--you see, I lived here a long time,
before  I  was  married--and  tomorrow evening we're dining out. But now let's go and have lunch, and Sam and you will have such a nice chance to
discuss all the details of the U.A.C. Just forget that I'm there."

And Hurd was unconscious that anything whatever had happened.

"Huh!  Guess  it'd  be pretty hard to ever forget YOU were around, Mrs. Dodsworth! But I certainly would like to get the real, honest-to-God low-
down  on  the  combine.  And  maybe you'll be able to come out to us for the week-end after that. One American thing we do stick to--real central
heating! Maybe won't be as swell as some of these castles, but lot more comfy all right!"

"Oh, I'm sure of it. Shall we go now?"

Sam  raged  within, "I'm not going to stand her highhatting him like that! He's being as polite as he can." And, as heartily as Hurd, he shouted,
"Wait there! Hold your horses, Fran! If Hurd is buying us all this expensive food, we got to give him a cocktail first. He'll be our housewarming
party here."

He stamped firmly across the floor, rang for a waiter, and ordered cocktails, ignoring her flashed fury, though he knew that he would have to pay
for it afterward. But he did hope that Hurd wouldn't say, drinking, "Well, here's looking at you, Chief!"

Hurd  didn't.  He  said, "Well, here's mud in your eye! Ha, ha, ha! Say, by golly, I guess it's a year since I've heard anybody get that off! But
there's  a  few  of  the good old American expressions a fellow likes to keep up, even when he's lived as long among the English as I have. Well,
let's go feed the old faces. Certainly is awful' nice to have you folks here. We must see a lot of each other."



Not  that Fran said anything rude at lunch. It would have been better so. She merely knotted her brows and looked suffering. Fortunately Hurd did
not  seem  to care; probably he did not look at her; probably he was one of the American men of whom Fran had complained that they never bothered
to look at a woman of over nineteen.

Hurd  was  unflagging.  "Guess  you  folks would like some American grub for a change. I do myself, after all these years here," he chuckled, and
ordered  clam  chowder,  fried chicken, and sugar corn. "You folks will do fine in this burg," he said. "You'll meet some of the best. I wouldn't
wonder  if  quite a few men in the City (that's what we call the Wall Street Section, here) have heard of you, Chief. And your good lady ought to
be  able  to  get  along fine with the ladies here. . . . Oh yes, you said you were here as a girl. Well, you'll find all that coming back to you
before  long.  Shouldn't  wonder  if you took to English life quicker'n I did myself, and say, I took to it like a duck to water. Of course I'm a
one-hundred-per-cent.  American,  but  I do like English ways, and this damn' Prohibition--excuse me, Mrs. Dodsworth, but I'm agin Prohibition--I
guess  that's  about the only subject where I haven't got any come-back when my English pals razz me about the States. And the wages for servants
here--Say, ain't it simply incredible, by Jove, what kitchen mechanics expect to get in America, and never do a lick of work for it! Sure, you'll
like  it  here.  But  say, you must be sure to not make one mistake that even a lot of high-class Americans make when they first come over. Don't
ever boast about how much money you make--"

(Surely Hurd must catch Fran's choke of rage.)

"--because  the  British think that's what they call putting on side. Not that you would do that, of course, but I mean--Surprise you how many of
the  real  bon  ton  do.  And  of  course I don't need to suggest to anybody with a social position like yours, Chief, that you can't just get to
talking  to  fellows  in a hotel bar here, like we would back home. Oh, you bet. I shouldn't wonder if you'd catch onto English ways even quicker
than--Well,  as  I  was  saying,  I don't want to intrude on you folks, but it'd be a mighty great pleasure to give you any hints I can about the
British slant on things, and to start you off with a genuine English bunch of acquaintances."

"It's  frightfully  kind  of you, and it's been such a nice lunch," said Fran. "But do you mind if we run along now? I'm afraid I'm a little late
for my engagement at the hairdresser's."



When, quite wordless, they had walked through Trafalgar Square, he snarled at Fran, "Oh, SAY it!"

"Need I?"

"Better get it over!"

"You seem to be saying it to yourself, quite successfully!"

"I am. Only hurry the execution. I have too much imagination."

"Have you? If you had, would you have invited the charming and helpful and tactful Mr. A. B. Hurd to lunch with me? Couldn't you have enjoyed his
highly British presence by yourself?"

"Fran,  we've  said  all of this about so many different people--Granted that I am a good deal of a fool about bringing the wrong kinds of people
together--"

"You are, my beloved, and everybody gives you credit for being so loyal and hospitable!"

"Granted.  And  I  admit  Hurd likes himself a good deal. On the other hand, he's generous, he's honest, he's probably a man of very little home-
training  as  a  youngster. And that--No, wait now! You DON'T know what I'm going to say! In that I've expressed all our whole row, if we went on
with  it  all  afternoon.  You'd  just  go on saying that he's a fathead, and I'd just go on insisting that he's got a kind heart. Can't you ever
forego  the pleasure of catching me in an error? Here we are in London, with a free afternoon ahead of us and the job of lunching with Hurd done.
Must you be sulky?"

"I  am  not  sulky! Only you can't expect me to be very radiant after an experience like that! Oh, it doesn't matter." She achieved a half-smile.
"Never mind. We'll be meeting some decent people here soon. No, don't--don't tell me that Hurd is decent. Probably he is. Probably he never beats
his  wife.  I'm sure that his playmate, Sir Toppingham Cohen, is an adornment to any salon. . . . Oh, all right, Sam; I'll be good. Only damn it,
damn it, damn it, to think of wasting time like--Oh, let's go to Bond Street and buy lots of painfully expensive things."



When  for  two hours they had shopped up Regent Street and down Bond, Fran was in an expansive, youthful, rattling mood, and she cried, "Let's go
back to the hotel--it really is a nice sitting-room--and have tea there by our own fireplace."

On the large table in their sitting-room was a box of roses.

"Oh, and you THOUGHT of me, this morning!" she rejoiced.

He had, but he had not thought of the flowers. They were from Major Lockert.

"Oh,  it doesn't matter," she said, in a tone which suggested that it decidedly did matter, and while he was being over-solicitous about the kind
of cakes she'd like with tea, Lockert himself was announced.

Lockert  remarked, as though he had seen them five minutes before, "It's cost me almost a bob at the club telephone to find out where you were. I
say  Dodsworth  my cousin says you're entirely wrong about hydraulic brakes I say won't you come down to his place for the week-end awf'ly modest
country  cot  sort  of place he'd like awf'ly to have you no no tea thanks must run along forgive informality General's a widower no Lady Herndon
call on you do come."



"At  the same time," Sam complained, "Hurd and your friend Lockert aren't essentially different. (Oh, I don't know whether we ought to go down to
Lord  Herndon's  or  not--no  reason  why he should care to see me, and it'll be one of these houses with forty servants.) Oh, Lockert talks more
politely  than  Hurd,  but  at bottom they're both bullies--they both want to do things for you that you don't want done. I wish Tub Pearson were
here!"

"You  would!  Of  course we're going to Herndon's. And not because he's a General and a Lord but because--Well. Yes. Because he's a General and a
Lord. That's an interesting fact to discover about myself. Am I a snob? Splendid! I shall get on, if I can only be clear and resolute about it!"



CHAPTER 9


Lockert  called  for  them in a long, sumptuous, two-seater Sunbeam which he drove himself. He insisted that there was plenty of room in the seat
for  the  three  of  them, but it seemed to Sam that they were crowded, and that Fran, glossy in her gray squirrel coat and her small cloche hat,
snuggled too contentedly against Lockert's shoulder.

He  forgot  it  in the pleasure of driving from the lowering smoke of London to the winter sunshine of the country; gray fields beginning to stir
with  green,  breathing  a faint bright mist, above which, in the shining branches of the trees, the rooks were jubilant. Little villages he saw,
with  homely tea rooms and inn signs--"The Rose and Crown," "The Green Dragon," and "The Faithful Friend"; then thatched farmhouses, oasthouses--
he could not understand what these domestic lighthouses might be--and on a ridge the splayed ruin of a castle, his first castle!

Knights in tourney; Elaine in white samite, mystic, wonderful--no, it was Guinevere who wore the white samite, wasn't it? must read some Tennyson
again.  Dukes  riding  out  to  the Crusades with minstrels playing on--what was it?--rebecks? Banners alive, and a thousand swords flashing. And
these  fairy stories really had happened, and around that wall up there, with its one broken lump of a tower! The cavalcade of knights--following
this  same  road!--became  more real to him than the motor, for he was bored by the talk of Fran and Lockert and lost the thread of it in ancient
book-colored  memories which returned as desirable and somehow tragic. The other two were chattering of cricket at Lord's, of polo at Hurlingham;
they  were  spitefully  recalling the poor old rustic banker on the Ultima who came to dinner every evening in prehistoric dress clothes with the
top  of his trousers showing like a narrow black scarf above the opening of his baggy white waistcoat. Their superciliousness shut Sam out in the
darkness along with the kindly old banker.

He  wanted  to  escape from the hotel-and-theater London of the tourist and see the authentic English--Dorset shepherds--cotton operatives on the
dole  in  Salford--collier  captains  in  Bristol  harbor--Cornish  tin-miners--Cambridge  dons--hop-pickers in Kentish pubs--great houses in the
Dukeries.  But  they  were  too low or too high for Fran's attention, and was it probable, he sighed, that he would see anything that she did not
choose?

A  little  incredulously  he  perceived  that Fran was really attracted by Lockert--she who had not been given to even the flimsiest of tea-table
flirtations,  who  had blushed and looked soft-eyed only at the attentions of the very best of visiting celebrities: a lecturing English novelist
or  a  young Italian baron who was studying motor factories; she who had ever been rude with a swift cold rudeness to such flappers as were known
to indulge in that midnight pawing known in Zenith as "necking." But Lockert seemed by his placid bullying to have broken her glistening shell of
sexlessness. She, so touchy, so ready to take offense, accepted Lockert as though he were her oldest friend, to wrangle with, to laugh with.

"You drive much too fast," she said.

"It would be too fast for any one who wasn't as good a driver as I am."

"Oh, really! I suppose you've won races!"

"I  have.  With  German shells. I was in the motor transport before they sent me to America. I've driven at night, on a road full of shell holes,
without lights, at thirty miles an hour. . . . As I was saying, you're too American, Mrs. Dodsworth. Americans understand themselves less and are
less  understood  by  the  world than any nation that's ever existed. You're excellent at all the things in which you're supposed to be lacking--
lyric  poetry,  formal  manners,  lack  of  cupidity.  And  you're so timid and incompetent at the things in which you're supposed to excel--fast
motoring,  aviation,  efficiency in business, pioneering--why, Britain has done more pioneering, in Canada and Africa and Australia and China, in
any  given  ten  years,  than  the  States  have in twenty. And you, who feel you're so European, you're so typically American! You have the most
charming  and  childish  misconceptions about yourself. You think you're an arrogant, self-contained, rational, ambitious woman, whereas actually
you're  warm-hearted  and  easily  dazzled--you're  simply  an eager young woman, and it's only your shyness that keeps you going about doing the
starry-eyed-wonder and trusting-little-niece sort of thing."

"My  dear Major Lockert, I hope that the combination of your extraordinarily careful driving and your extraordinarily generous mind-reading isn't
tiring you too much!"

But she didn't, Sam realized, succeed in making it nasty.

She  had  turned entirely toward Lockert. She no longer noticed Sam when he mumbled, "There's a lovely old stone church," or "Guess those are hop
poles"; when he wanted to hold her hand and tell her with quick little pressures that they were sharing the English countryside.

"Oh, well--" he reflected.

He  recalled  "Pickwick  Papers,"  and  the  coach  with  the jovial, well-warmed philosophers swaying down the frosty roads for Christmas in the
country.

"Great!" he said.



They  stopped  for  lunch  at  a  village inn. To Sam's alert gratification they drove under an archway into a courtyard of coaching days. He was
delighted by the signs on the low dark doors beneath the archway: Coffee Room, Lounge, Saloon Bar.

They  stamped  their feet and swung their arms as the Pickwickians had done when they had stopped, perhaps, at this same inn. If Fran had ignored
him,  she took him in again and warmed him with her smile, with an excited "Isn't this adorable, Sam! Just what we wanted!" She insisted, despite
Lockert's  ruddy  and spinsterish protests, on going into the taproom and there, with authentic-looking low rafters, paneling of black oak, floor
of  cherry-red tiles, they sat at a long wooden table between benches, and Sam and Lockert warmed themselves with whisky while Fran sipped half a
pint of bitter out of a pewter mug--Sam secretly bought it from the bar-maid afterward, and lost it in Paris.

The  stairs  to  the  dining-room were carpeted in warm dark red; the wall was plastered with Victorian pictures: Wellington at Waterloo, Melrose
Abbey  by  Moonlight,  Prince Collars and Cuffs, Rochester Castle; and on the landing was such a Cabinet of Curiosities as Sam had not seen since
childhood: a Javanese fan, carved chessmen, Chinese coins, and a nugget of Australian gold.

The  dining-room  was dominated by a stone fireplace on which were carved the Tudor rose and the high-colored arms of the local Earl. Near it, on
the  oak  buffet,  crowned with enormous silver platters, were a noble ham, a brown-crusted veal and ham pie, a dish of gooseberry tart; and at a
table two commercial travelers were gorging themselves on roast beef with Yorkshire pudding.

"Great!" Sam rejoiced, and his glow continued even through watery greens and disconsolate Brussels sprouts.



Beyond Sevenoaks, Lockert played a lively tattoo with the horn, and shouted, "Almost there! Welcome to the Stately Homes of England!"

They came to an estate, high-walled, with deer to be seen through grilled gates, and the twisted Tudor chimneys of a great house visible beyond a
jungle of pines.

"Oh,  Lord, is this the place?" Sam privately wondered. "It'll be terrible! Ten footmen. I wonder if they do wear plush knee-pants? Whom does one
tip?"

But  the  car  raced  past this grandeur, dipped into a red-brick hamlet, turned off High Street and into a rough lane gloomy between hedges, and
entered  a driveway before a quite new, quite unpretentious house of ten or twelve rooms. As with thousands of houses they had passed in crawling
out  of  London,  there  was a glassed-in porch littered with bicycles, rubbers, and rather consumptive geraniums. At one side of the house was a
tennis-court, an arbor, and the skeletons of a rose-garden, but of lawn there was scarcely a quarter-acre.

"I told you it was only a box," Lockert drawled, as he drew up with a sputter of gravel at the door.

There was a roar within. The door was opened by a maid, very stiff in cap and apron, but past her brushed the source of the roaring--a tiny, very
slim  image  of a man, his cheeks almost too smoothly pink to be real, his mustache too precise and silvery, and his voice a parade-ground bellow
too enormous to be credited in so miniature a soldier.

"How d'you do, Mrs. Dodsworth. Most awfully nice of you to come!" he thundered, and Lockert muttered, "This is the General."

If,  in  his  quest  for romance, the exterior of the house was a jar to Sam, the drawing-room was precisely what he had desired, without knowing
that  he  had  desired it. Here was definitely Home, with a homeliness which existed no longer in most of the well-to-do houses of Zenith, where,
between  the  great  furniture factories and the young female decorators with their select notions about "harmony" and "periods," any respectable
living-room  was  as  shiny and as impersonal as a new safety-razor blade. At Herndon's, blessedly, no two bits of furniture belonged to the same
family  or  age,  yet the chintzes, the fireplace, the brass fire-irons, the white paneling, belonged together. On a round table in a corner were
the  General's  cups--polo  cups,  golf  cups, the cup given him by his mess in India, a few medals, and a leering Siva; and through low casement
windows  the  gray  garden  was seen sloping down to meadows and a willow-bordered pond. And the maid was wheeling in a tea-wagon with a tall old
silver teapot, old silver slop-jar, mounds of buttered scones, and such thin bread and butter as Sam had never known could exist.

After  a  tea  during  which Herndon rumbled rather libelous stories about his fellow soldiers, they walked up the lane, across a common on which
donkeys  and embattled geese were grazing, past half-timbered shops with tiny windows containing a jar or two of sweets, to the fifteenth-century
flint  church,  in  itself  a history of all Kent. The tower was square, crenelated, looking as though it would endure forever. In the low stone-
paved porch were parish registers, and the names of the vicars of the parish since the Norman Gilles de Pierrefort of 1190. The pillars along the
nave were ponderous stone; on the wall were brasses with epitaphs in black and red; in the chancel were the ancient stone shelf of the piscina of
Roman  Catholic  days,  and  a  slab commemorating Thos Siwickley, Kt.--all but the name and the florid arms had been worn away by generations of
priestly feet.

While  Herndon  was  lecturing  them  on  the  beauties of the church--with rather more than a hint about the iron-bound chest in which tourists,
particularly  American  tourists,  were  permitted  to  deposit  funds  for  the  restoration  of the roof--the vicar came in, a man innocent and
enthusiastic  at  forty-five,  tall,  stooped,  much  spectacled,  speaking  an Oxonian English so thick that Sam could understand nothing beyond
"strawdnerly well-proportioned arches," which did not much enlighten him.

As they ambled home he saw candles in cottage windows.

They  stopped  to  greet a porcelain-cheeked little old woman with a wreck of a black hat, a black bag of a suit, and exquisite gloves and shoes,
whom Herndon introduced as Lady Somebody-or-other--

"But,"  Sam reflected, "it isn't real! It's fiction! The whole thing, village and people and everything, is an English novel--and I'm in it! This
is  Chapter  Two,  and  it's lovely. But I wonder about Chapter Twenty. Will there be the deuce to play? . . . Just because life is more easy and
human  here,  I  feel  more  out  of  it. So accustomed to having my office and the boys to boss around--Now that I've quit, I've got nothing but
myself--and  Fran,  of course--to keep me busy. These people, Lockert and Lord Herndon, they can live in themselves more. They don't need a movie
palace  and a big garage to be content. I've got to learn that, but--Oh, I enjoyed seeing that church, and yet I feel lonely for old Tub making a
hell of a racket."

The glow in him faded as he trudged with Lockert, both of them silent, behind the chattering Fran and Herndon.

And  he  was  irritated  when  Herndon  turned  back  to crow, in the most flattering way, "You know, I should never in the world have taken Mrs.
Dodsworth and you for Americans. I should have thought you were an English couple who had lived for some time in the Colonies."

Sam grumbled within, childishly, "I suppose that's an Englishman's notion of the best compliment he can pay you!"

But  Herndon  was  so  cordial  that  he  could not hint his resentment. He would, just that moment, have preferred rudeness and the chance of an
enlivening  row.  But  his  loneliness,  his  uncharted  apprehension, vanished with the whisky and soda which both Herndon and Lockert deemed it
necessary  for  him  to take before dinner, to ward off all possible colds and other ills. As he stalked up to their bedroom (the reddest red and
the shiniest brass and the most voluble little fire), Sam fretted, "I'm getting to be as touchy and fanciful and changeable as an old maid. Yet I
never  was  cranky  in  the  office  . . . never very cranky. Am I too old to learn to loaf? I will!" And he said, as he entered the room and was
startled  anew at Fran's shiningness in a combination of white glove silk, "Oh, honey, speaking of old churches, you fitted into that stone aisle
as if you were the lady of the manor!"

"And you were so big and straight! Lockert and the General are sweet but--Oh, you old sweet stone statue!"

He  remembered  for weeks their warm shared affection in the warm red room, as they laughed and dressed. His slight jealousies disappeared at the
thought of Lockert off somewhere dressing alone, probably in a room as chill as the drafty corridor.

CHAPTER 10


There  came in for dinner only a neighbor, whose name was Mr. Alls or Mr. Aldys or Mr. Allis or Mr. Hall or Mr. Aw or Mr. Hoss, with his wife and
spinster  sister.  Because  of  the  British fetish of unannotated introductions, Sam never did learn the profession of Mr. Alls (if that was his
name)  and naturally, to an American, the profession of a stranger is a more important matter than even his income, his opinion of Socialism, his
opinion  of  Prohibition, or the make of his motor car. Listening to the conversation, Sam concluded at various times that Mr. Alls was a lawyer,
an  investment  banker,  a  theatrical  manager,  an author, a Member of Parliament, a professor, or a retired merchant whose passions were Roman
remains and race-track gambling.

For Mr. Alls was full of topics.

And all through the evening Sam kept confusing Mrs. Alls and Miss Alls.

They  were  exactly  alike.  They  were  both tall, thin, shy, pleasant, silent, and clad in lusterless black evening frocks of no style or epoch
whatever. Against their modest dullness, Fran was a rather theatrical star in her white satin with a rope of pearls about her gesticulatory right
arm . . . and she was also a little strident and demanding.

When Sam was introduced to Mrs. Alls (or it may have been Miss Alls), she said, "Is this your first visit to England? Are you staying long?"

Contrariwise,  when he was introduced to Miss Alls (unless it was Mrs. Alls), she murmured, "How d'you do. How long are you staying in England? I
believe this is your first visit."

So far as he could remember, they said nothing else whatever until they went home.

But  Herndon, Lockert, Fran, and Mr. Alls made up for that silence. The General liked an audience, and considered Fran an admirable one. When she
thought  any one worth the trouble, she could be a clown, a great lady, a flirt, all in one. She was just irreverent enough to rouse Herndon, yet
her  manner  hinted  that  all the while she really regarded him as greater than Napoleon and more gallant than Casanova. So he thundered out his
highly  contradictory  opinions  on Kaiser Wilhelm, the breeding of silver foxes, the improbabilities of Mr. Michael Arien's "The Green Hat," the
universal  and  scandalous neglect of the back-hand stroke in tennis, the way to cook trout, the errors of Winston Churchill, the errors of Lloyd
George,  the  errors  of  Lord  Kitchener,  the  errors  of Ramsay MacDonald, the errors of Lord Birkenhead, the errors of Danish butter, and the
incomparable errors of Lockert in regard to emigration and dog-feeding. Otherwise, the General said scarcely anything.

"The trouble with this country is," observed Herndon, "that there're too many people going about saying: 'The trouble with this country is--' And
too  many  of  us, who should be ruling the country, are crabbed by being called 'General' or 'Colonel' or 'Doctor' or that sort of thing. If you
have a handle to your name, you have to be so jolly and democratic that you can't control the mob."

"We'll try to free you from that if you come to America," said Fran, "I'll introduce you as Mr. James Herndon, the pansy-grower, and I'll tell my
butler that you're so fond of rude garden life that you'd be delighted to have him call you 'Jimmy.'"

"Am  I expected, Ma'am, to say that I'd be charmed by anything that YOUR butler might care to call me? As a matter of fact, I'd ask him not to be
so formal, but call me 'Whiffins.' However, unfortunately, I am not named James."

"And  unfortunately  we  haven't a butler, but only a colored gentleman who condescends to help us with the cocktails at parties, if he isn't too
busy down in Shanty Town, preaching. But honestly--Am I in bad taste? If I'm not, isn't it really rather pleasant to be known as Your Lordship?"

"Oh--I  inherited  the handle while a subaltern--no great day of mourning for lost dear ones, you know--I inherited from a most gloomy old uncle.
I'd  never been able to rebuke my colonel--tried to, in my eager boyish way, but he'd never noticed it. When I inherited, he used to go quite out
of  his  way to rebuke ME, so I knew I'd made an impression. Fact, he was so stiff with me that I became popular with the mess. But of course you
Yanks, roving your broad steppes, never dream of such puerile triumphs."

"Quite. They're too busy punching cattle," said Lockert; and Mr. Alls inquired, "Just how does one punch an unfortunate cow?"

"It's  now  done  with  automatic  punching-machinery," explained Lockert. "Neat little hole right through the ear. Mrs. Dodsworth is an expert--
punches six cattle simultaneously, while singing the 'Star Spangled Banner' and firing pistols."

"But my real achievement," asserted Fran, "is shooting Indians. I'd shot nine before I was five years old."

"Is it true," demanded Lord Herndon, "that the smarter American women always have girdles made of scalps?"

"Oh, absolutely--it's as de rigueur as for an Englishwoman to carry a bouquet of Brussels sprouts at a lawn-party, or--"



"Oh, what a hell of a way to talk!" fretted Sam Dodsworth.

"If  they  can't  talk  sense, why don't they dry up? What's the use of talking, anyway, beyond 'Pass the salt' and 'How much do you want a ton?'
Aren't these folks ever serious?"



Suddenly they were serious, and he was even less comfortable.

"Mr. Dodsworth," asked Mr. Alls (or Mr. Ross), "why is it that America hasn't recognized Soviet Russia?"

"Why, uh--we're against their propaganda."

"But who is really responsible for the American policy? Congress or the Foreign Department?"

"I'm afraid I don't exactly remember."

It occurred to Sam that he hadn't the smallest information about Russian relations with America; only a thin memory of a conference about selling
cars in Russia. He was equally shaky when they questioned him about the American attitudes toward the Allied war debt and toward Japan.

"Am  I  beginning  to get old?" he wondered. "I used to keep up on things. Seems as though this last five years I haven't thought of anything but
selling cars and playing golf."

He  felt old--he felt older and older as Fran and Herndon slid over into a frivolous debate about lion hunting. He had never known that she could
be  so  fantastic.  Here  she  was  telling  some  perfectly silly story about their having had a dear old lion for a pet; about Sam's kicking it
downstairs  one  frosty night when he was in a bad temper; the poor lion slinking down the street, pursued by a belligerent black kitten, fleeing
to the Zoo, and whimpering to be let into a cage. (And there wasn't even a Zoo in Zenith!)

Old!  And out of it. He couldn't join in their talk, whether it was nonsense or the discussion of nationalization of mines presently set going by
Herndon,  who announced himself a Socialist as fervently as twenty minutes before he had announced himself a Die-Hard Tory. It was one of the few
conversations in years in which Sam had not had an important, perhaps a commanding position. At dinner in Zenith, if he didn't feel authoritative
when  they  talked of Stravinsky or the Algerian tour, soon or late the talk would return to motors and a mystery known as "business conditions,"
and then he would settle all debates.

He suddenly felt insecure.



As  they walked to church next morning, he felt for the Kentish village a tenderness as for a shrunken, tender old grandmother. And when he noted
a  Revelation  car  parked  across  from the church, he was certain again that he was Somebody. But amid the politely interested, elegantly pious
congregation  at  Morning  Prayer, glancing at him over their celluloid-covered prayer books, he felt insecurity again. He was overgrown, clumsy,
untutored. He wanted to flee from this traditional stillness to the anonymity and shielding clamor of London.



They rode, for the hour between church and luncheon, on ragged but sturdy horses from the village stable. Mrs. Alls had lent a wreck of a riding-
habit  to  Fran, who looked disreputable and gay in her orange tam o' shanter--gayer than in her ordinary taut sleekness. They rode away from the
village, through fields and shaggy woods, to the ridge of the North Downs.

For  years Fran had ridden twice a week with an English ex-groom, turned gentleman teacher and trainer in America, his Cockney accent accepted in
Zenith as the breath of British gentility. With her slim straightness she sat her aged nag like a young cavalry officer. Lockert and Lord Herndon
looked at her more admiringly than ever, spoke to her more cheerily, as though she were one of their own.

Sam's riding had been a boyhood-vacation trifling; he was about as confident on a horse as he would have been in an aeroplane; he had never quite
got  over  feeling,  on  a  horse's  back,  that  he was appallingly far up from the ground. Herndon had a shaky leg, and Sam and he rode slowly.
Suddenly Lockert and Fran left them, in a gallop along the pleasant plateau at the top of the Downs.

"Don't you want to keep up with 'em? My leg's not up to much today," said Herndon.

"No, I'll trail," Sam sighed.

In a quarter-hour Fran and Lockert came cantering back. She was laughing. She had taken off her tam, and her hair was wild.

"Sorry we ran away, but the air was so delicious--simply had to have a scamper!" she cried and, to Sam, "Oh, was oo left alone! Poor boy!"

All the way back she insisted on riding beside him, consoling him.

A month ago he had felt that he had to protect her frailness. He was conscious now that his breath was short, that he had a corporation . . . and
that Fran, turning to call back to Lockert, was bored by him.



Most  insecure of all was Sam that afternoon when they motored for tea to Woughton Hall, the country place of Sir Francis Ouston, the new hope of
the  Liberals  in  Parliament. Here--so overwhelmingly that Sam gasped--was one of the great houses of which he had been apprehensive. Up a mile-
long driveway of elms they came to a lofty Palladian facade, as stern as a court-house, with a rough stone wing at one end. "That's the old part,
that stone--built about 1480," said Herndon.

In  front  was a terrace rimmed with clipped cypresses in the shape of roosters, crescents, pyramids, with old Italian wine-jars of stone. To the
right,  beyond a pair of tennis-courts, half a mile of lawn slipped in pale winter green toward rough meadows; to the left the stables were a red
brick village. There was about the whole monstrous palace a quietness dotted only with the sound of sparrows and distant rooks. To Sam, just now,
the  millionaire  country  houses  he  had seen on Long Island and the North Shore above Chicago--Tudor castles, Italian villas, French chateaux,
elephantine Mount Vernons, mansions which he had admired and a little coveted--were raw as new factories beside a soft old pasture.

Through  a  vast  entrance  hall with tapestries on walls of carved stucco, and high Italian candle-sticks at the foot of a walnut stairway, they
were  shepherded to a carved oak drawing-room high as a church, and much noisier. After that Sam knew nothing but confusion and babble. First and
last  there  must  have been fifty people popping in for tea, people with gaudy titles and cheery manners, people so amiable to him that he could
not  hate  them  as  he  longed  to.  What  they  were all talking about, he never knew. They spoke of Sybil, who seemed to be an actress, and of
politicians  (he  guessed  they  were  politicians)  to  whom  they referred as Nancy and F.E. and Jix and Winston and the P.M. One man mentioned
something called the Grand National, and Sam was not sure whether this was the name of a bank, an insurance company, or a hotel.

What could he do when a lady, entirely unidentified, asked, "Have you seen H. G.'s latest?"

"Not yet," he answered intelligently, but who or what H. G. might be, he never did learn.

And  through  the  bright-colored  maelstrom of people, his heart aching with loneliness, he saw Fran move placidly, shiningly, man-conscious and
man-conquering and at home. They were all one family; they took her in; but himself, how to get in he had no notion. He had addressed conventions
of bankers; he had dragooned a thousand dancing people at a Union Club ball; but here--these people were so close-knit, so serenely sure, that he
was an outsider.

He  escaped from the lady who knew about H. G.; he crawled through the mass of suspended tea-cups and struggled to Fran's side. She was confiding
(not very truthfully) to a man with a single eyeglass that she had a high, passionate, unresting interest in polo.

When Sam had the chance, he sighed to her, "Let's get out. Too darn' many people for me!"

"They're darlings! And I've made the most terrific hit with Lady Ouston. She wants us to come to dinner in town."

"Well--I'd just like--Thought we might get a little fresh air before dinner. I feel sort of out of it here. They all chirp so fast."

"You didn't seem to be doing so badly. I saw you in the corner with the Countess of Baliol."

"Was  I?  Which  one? All the women I talked to just looked like women. Why the devil don't they wear their coronets? Honestly, Fran, this is too
rich for my blood. I can stand meeting a couple hundred people at once, but not the entire British aristocracy. They--"

"My dear Sam, you are talking exactly like Mr. A. B. Hurd."

"I feel exactly like Mr. A. B. Hurd!"

"Are  you  going to demand that we take Zenith with us every place we go? Are you going to refuse to like anything that's the least bit different
from a poker party at Tub Pearson's? And are you going to insist that _I_ be scared and old, too, and not reach out for the great life that I can
learn  to master--oh, I can, I can! I'm doing it! Must I go back with you now and sit at Lord Herndon's select villa reading the Observer or else
be punished by your sulking?"



And  it  was she who was sulky, though he had doubtfully urged her to stay as long as she liked--or as Herndon liked. She showed a gray sulkiness
all  evening,  but not toward Herndon, decidedly not toward Lockert. They had only a cold ham and beef supper, with no other guests, and publicly
Fran  was  frivolous.  She played the piano, played and played, and since Herndon was seized with a passion to discuss motor headlights with Sam,
Lockert  hung  about  the  piano. Herndon and Sam were at the other end of the drawing-room, before the fireplace, backs to the piano, but in the
Venetian mirror over the fireplace Sam could watch the others, and he did, uneasily.

Only then was he certain that Lockert aspired to considerably more than a polite friendliness with Fran.

Lockert  turned  her  music, he kept drawling amiable insults that were apparently more fetching than flattery. His hand touched her sleeve, once
rested  on  her  shoulder.  She shrugged it off and shook her head, but she was not angry. Once Sam heard her: "--don't know WHY I like you--your
perfectly disconcerting admiration of yourself--"

He felt, Sam, like a worthy parent watching his daughter and a suitor. He felt resigned. Then he began to feel angry.

"Damn it, was that why Lockert got us down here? To make love to Fran? Does he think I'm the kind that'll stand it? Does she?"

When  they  were  going  to  bed,  his accumulated anger came out in a chilly: "See here, my girl! All this His Lordship, Her Grace, Old England,
palatial  mansion stuff is fine--I've enjoyed it--but you're letting it dazzle you. You're letting Lockert be a whole lot too flirtatious. You're
off your track. At home, you'd see that he doesn't just mean to pay you pretty little compliments--"

"My dear Mr. Dodsworth, do you mean to insinuate--"

"No, I'm saying it straight! Little good home bullying!"

"Do  you  mean  to  insinuate that I'd let Major Lockert, or anybody else, make the slightest improper advances toward me? I that never tolerated
loose  dancing  at  home,  that  have  never  in my life so much as held hands in a taxi? I that--oh, it's too beautifully ironical!--that you've
practically accused, time and again, of being too sexless to suit your manly ardors! Oh, it's too much!"

"Yes,  at  home  that  has  been so. Though I've never accused you of sexlessness--even when I've damn' well suffered from it! I've been patient.
Waited.  Waited  a mighty long time. That's what makes it worse now, when you've been so little attracted by me, to see you falling for this man,
or at least, I mean, being obviously attracted by him, just because he's--"

"Oh, SAY it! 'Just because he's the cousin of a Lord!' Say it! Try to make me seem as contemptible a little village greenhorn as you can!"

"I hadn't intended to say anything of--Well, if I did, what I meant was: I mean, just because he's wandered enough so that he knows how to handle
women by beating them. I can't. Never could beat you. Wouldn't if I could. . . . Oh, never mind. I don't mean anything serious. I just mean--Even
though  you  are  naturally  something  of a European, you've got to remember that this is a pretty wise and dangerous old country. But of course
you've got too much sense. Sorry I said anything."

She  was  standing, a little rigid, in her low-necked, lace-trimmed, yellow pajamas. He lumbered toward her, his hands out bumbling, "Sorry! Kiss
me!"

She  shuddered.  She wailed, "No, don't touch me! Oh, don't you EVER suggest things like that again! Lockert? I haven't the slightest interest in
him. I'm ashamed of you! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!"

She resolutely said nothing more before they went to sleep; and in the morning she was queerly quiet and her eyes looked tired.

Lord  Herndon,  kindest  of hosts and one of the few living men who were cheerful and full of ideas at breakfast, seemed hurt by their aloofness,
but  Lockert  was  inquisitive  and  slightly  amused,  and  at  the  station  (the  Dodsworths  were to return by train) he searched Fran's eyes
interrogatively . . . most hopefully.

Sam  was  glad when the train was away, and she tried to pump up a friendly smile for him. But he was all abasement, all savage scorn of himself,
that  he  should  have  spoiled  the happy party of this, his child, by bucolic suspicions. She had been so innocently happy in discovering rural
England,  in sturdy friendship with Lockert, in chatter with Herndon, in a hair-blown race across the Downs, and then, he groaned, he had spoiled
it all for her.

He took her hand, but it was lax--all strength gone out of the hand that yesterday had been so firm on the bridle.



CHAPTER 11


The  possessions  of  Sir Francis Ouston were numerous and very pretty. He owned thousands of acres of Welsh coal land, he owned Woughton Hall in
Kent  and  a  tall,  bleak-faced  house  in  Eaton  Square, he owned the famous mare Capriciosa III, and he owned a position in the Liberal Party
immediately after that of Asquith and Lloyd George.

He himself was owned by his wife.

Lady  Ouston was a beautiful woman and very commanding. She had a high, quick, passionate voice and many resolute opinions. She was firm and even
a  little  belligerent  about  the  preferability  of  Jay's to Poiret in the matter of frocks, about the treachery of the Labor Party, about the
desirability  (entirely  on  behalf  of  the  country) of Sir Francis's becoming Prime Minister, about the heinousness of beer-drinking among the
working  classes,  about  the scoundrelism of roast chicken without a proper bread sauce, and particularly about the bad manners, illiteracy, and
money-grubbing of the United States of America.

She had been born--and her father and mother before her--in Nashville, Tennessee.

She was a formidable hostess. She had a salon, and while she did explorers and chemists and the few authors who understood morning coats, she had
never  stooped  to  fill her drawing-room by exhibiting cubist painters, Hindu nationalists, American cowboys, or any of the other freaks whereby
rival professional hostesses attracted the right sort of people.

And her dinners were admirable. You could be sure of Napoleon brandy, the cousin of a duke, and the latest story about the vulgarity of New York.

It  was  not  to  one  of Lady Ouston's very best dinners, with a confidential cabinet minister present, that Lockert persuaded her to invite the
Dodsworths, but it was quite a good, upper-middle dinner, with Clos-Vougeot and the master of a Cambridge college.

Sam  was  quiet,  extremely  observant,  not  extremely jolly, as he surveyed that regiment of twenty people, all nibbling so delicately at their
salmon  and  at  other  people's  reputations. No one seemed to have any vulgarly decided opinions, and every one desired to know of him only two
things: Was this his first visit to England? and How long would he stay? And they didn't seem to care so very much about either.

He  wondered  how  many times he himself had asked foreign visitors to the Revelation plant--Britishers, Swedes, Germans, Frenchmen--whether this
was their first visit to America, and How long did they plan to stay?

"I'll never say THAT again!" he vowed.

The  dinner  rather  went  on. Soup and a murmur about broadcasting and Bernard Shaw; salmon and a delicate murmur about Mussolini and influenza;
roast mutton and an exchange of not very interested confidences about cat burglars. Sam was in a daze of gluttony and politeness when he realized
that  Lady  Ouston was talking to him about America, and that every one at the table was beginning to pay attention. He did not know that she was
born an American, and he listened to her with almost no comfort:

"--and of course none of us would ever think of classing your darling wife and you with the terrible, TERRIBLE sort of American tourists that one
sees--or  hears,  rather--at  the  Cecil  or  in trains--where DO you suppose such Americans come from! In fact, I'm quite sure you could both be
mistaken  for  English, if you merely lived here a few years. So it's a quite impersonal question. But don't you feel, as we do, that for all our
admiration  of  American  energy and mechanical ingenuity, it's the most terrible country the world has ever seen? Such voices--like brass horns!
Such  rudeness!  Such  lack of reticence! And such material ideals! And the standardization--every one thinking exactly alike about everything. I
give  you  my word that you'll be so glad you've deserted your ghastly country that after two years here, you'll never want to go home. Don't you
already feel that a bit?"

Sam  Dodsworth  had  never  in his life boasted of being an American nor yet apologized for it. It was amazement which made him mutter, with what
sounded like humility, "Why, never thought much about America, as a whole. Sort of taken it for granted--"

"You  won't long! What a land! Such terrible politicians--positively the lowest form of animal life--even worse than Irish Republicans! And don't
you  rather  feel  ashamed  of  being  an  American  when  you  think of America's making us pay the war debt when, after all, it was all you did
contribute?"

"I do not!" Sam was suddenly and thoroughly angry; suddenly free of whatever diffidence he had before this formal society. "I never was much of a
flag-waver.  I  don't  suppose  America  is perfect, not by a long shot. I know we have plenty of fools and scoundrels, and I don't mind roasting
them. But if you'll excuse me for differing with you--"

Lockert said pacifyingly, "You can't expect Mr. Dodsworth to agree, Lady Ouston. Remember he's--"

Sam  snarled  on,  uncheckable:  "--I  suppose  I have been sort of assuming that America is the greatest nation on earth. And maybe it is. Maybe
because  we  have  got  so many faults. Shows we're growing! Sorry if it's bad manners not to be ashamed of being an American, but then I'll just
have to be bad mannered!"

Behind  his brusqueness he was saying to himself, and timidly, "Look at the dirty looks I'm getting! I've ditched things for Fran. What hell I'll
get from her!"

But  incredibly  it was Fran herself who was attacking: "My dear Lady Ouston, out of a hundred and ten million Americans, there must be a few who
have  agreeable voices and who think of something besides dollars! Considering how many of us are a generation or less from England, we must have
several  nice  people!  And  I  wonder  if every member of the British Parliament is a perfect little gentleman? I seem to have heard of rows--We
probably  have  more  self-criticism  at home than any other nation--our own writers call us everything from Main Streeters to the Booboisie. But
curiously enough we feel we must work out our own fate, unassisted by the generous foreigners!"

"I  think  Mrs.  Dodsworth  is  quite  right,"  said  Sir Francis. "We're not at all pleased here in England when the French and Italians call us
barbarians--as they jolly well do!"

Suavely he said it, and stoutly, but Sam knew that thenceforth Fran and he would be as popular in the house of Ouston as a pair of mad dogs.

Fran developed a tactful headache at a quarter after ten.

Sir Francis and Lady Ouston were very cordial at parting.

Sam and Fran were silent in the taxi till he sighed, "Sorry, honey. I was bad. Awfully sorry I lost my temper."

"It  doesn't MATTER! I'm glad you did! The woman's a fool! Oh, my dear--" Fran laughed hysterically. "I can see that the Oustons and us are going
to be buddies! They'll insist on our yachting round the world with them!"

"And scuttling the yacht!"

"Haven't they a dear little daughter, so Brent can marry her?"

"Fran, I'm crazy about you!"

"Du!  Old  grizzly!  I'm  glad  you  ARE  one!  Sam, a terrible thought occurs to me. I'll bet you anything that fool woman was born an American!
Convert!  Professional  expatriate! She's much too English to be English. Not that the real English love us any too much, but she's like an Irish
critic  living in London, or a Jewish peer--seven paces to the right of the King. Oh, my dear, my dear, and I might have fallen into expatriate--
Sam Dodsworth, if you ever catch me trying to be anything but a woolly American, will you beat me?"

"I will. But do I have to beat you very long at a time?"

"Probably.  I'm  rather a hussy. Only virtue is, I know it. And I did flirt with Clyde Lockert at Lord Herndon's! It flattered me to stir him out
of that 'Damn your eyes' superiority of his. And I did stir him, too! But I'm so 'shamed!"

In  their apartment she nuzzled her cheek against his shoulder, whispering, "Oh, I'd just like to crawl inside you and be part of you. Don't ever
let me go!"

"I won't!"



The Ouston debacle considerably checked Fran's social career, though Lockert continued their mentor. He came to tea the next day, casual as ever,
and drawled:

"Well, Merle Ouston was a bit of a public nuisance last night. So were you, Dodsworth!"

"Well, I couldn't sit there and listen to her--"

"You should've smiled. You Americans are always so touchy. No Englishman ever minds criticism of England. He laughs at it."

"Hm!  I've  heard that before--from Englishmen! I wonder if that isn't one of your myths about yourselves, like our belief that every American is
so  hospitable  that he'll give any stranger his shirt. Well, I've never seen any of our New York bankers down at Ellis Island begging the Polack
immigrants  to come stay with them till they get jobs. Look here, Lockert! The Ouston woman said all our politicians were hogs. Suppose I started
making nasty cracks about the King and the Prince of Wales--"

"That's quite different! That's a question of good taste! Never mind. Herndon and I are thoroughly pro-American."

"I know," said Fran. "You love America--except for the food, the manners, and the people."

"At least, there's one American that I esteem highly!" said Lockert, and his glance at her was ardent.

Sam waited for her to rebuke Lockert. She didn't.



Lockert  took  them to Ciro's, to dance; he had them made members of a rackety night club called "The Rigadoon," where there was friendliness and
gin  and  a  good deal of smell. Potentates of the English motor-manufacturing companies called on them and escorted Sam to their factories. They
met  three  or  four  stout  matrons  at  a  dinner given by Lord Herndon in the women's annex of the Combined Services Club, and they were again
admitted to the tedious perils of occasional dinner parties.

And  all  the  while  they  were as unrelated to living English life as though they were sitting in a railway station waiting for the continental
train.  Lockert  had  gone  off  to the Riviera, a week after the Ouston dinner. Sam was relieved--then missed him surprisingly. And with Lockert
away, their invitations were few.



"Well," said Sam, "till we get acquainted with more folks here, let's do the town. Historic spots and so on."

He  had studied Mr. Karl Baedeker's philosophical volume on London, and he was eager to see the Tower, the Houses of Parliament, Kew Gardens, the
Temple,  the  Roman  bath,  the  National  Gallery; eager to gallop up to Stratford and honor Shakespeare--not that he had honored Shakespeare by
reading him, these twenty-five years past; and to gallop down to Canterbury--not that he had ever gone so far as to read Chaucer.

But  Fran  made  him  uncomfortable  by complaining, "Oh, good Heavens, Sam, we're not trippers! I hate these post-card places. Nobody who really
belongs  ever  goes  to  them.  I'll  bet  Clyde  Lockert  has  never  been  inside the Tower. Of course galleries and cathedrals are different--
sophisticated  people do study them. But to sit at the Cheshire Cheese with a lot of people from Iowa and Oklahoma, exclaiming over Dr. Johnson--
atrocious!"

"I  must  say  I  don't get you. What's the idea of coming to a famous city and then not seeing the places that made it famous? You don't have to
send souvenir cards about 'em if you don't want to! And I don't believe the people from Iowa will bite you unless you attack 'em first!"

She  tried  to make clear to him the beauties of snobbishness in travel. But, in her loneliness, she did consent to go with him, even to eat lark
and oyster pie at the Cheese, though she was rather snappish with the waiter who wanted to show them the volumes of visitors' names.

Ambling  through  London  with  no  duty  of  arriving  anywhere in particular, Sam came to take its somber vastness as natural; felt the million
histories being enacted behind the curtained windows of the million houses. On clear days, when rare thin sunshine caressed the gray-green bricks
which  composed  the  backs  of London houses, even these ugly walls had for him, in relief at the passing of the mist-pall, a charm he had never
found in the hoydenish glare of sunshine on bright winter days in Zenith. He loved, as he became familiar with them, even the absurd proud little
shops  with  their  gaudy  glass and golden signs: chocolate shops with pictures of Royalty on the boxes of sweets, tobacco shops with cigarette-
cases  of  imitation silver for Sunday-strolling clerks to flourish, even the ardors and fumes of fried fish shops. He was elated at learning the
'bus  lines;  saying  judiciously,  "Let's  take a 92 and ride home on top." The virility of London, town of men back from conquering savages and
ruling the lone desert, seemed akin to him. . . . But Fran began to speak of Paris, that feminine and flirtatious refuge from reality.

Between explorations they tasted a loneliness they had never known in their busy domination of Zenith.

Evening  on  evening they sat in their suite pretending that they were exhausted after a day's "sight-seeing"; that they were exhausted, and glad
they  were  going to stroll out for dinner alone. All the while Sam knew that she was waiting, that he was waiting and praying, for the telephone
to ring.

At  their  several  party  dinners they had met agreeable people who said, "You must come to us, soon!" and then forgot them blissfully. London's
indifference  to her charms depressed Fran, seemed to frighten her. She was wistfully grateful when he thought of ordering flowers, when he found
some  unexpected  and cheery place to dine. Half the time he was pitiful that she should not be having her career; half the time he rejoiced that
they had never been so close together as now, in their isolation.

She was almost timid when Jack Starling, the nephew of Tub Pearson and a secretary at the American Embassy in London, came bouncing back to town,
called  formally, inspected Fran's complexion and Sam's grammar, and adopted them with reserved enthusiasm. He was a pleasant, well-pressed young
dancing-man,  and full of ideas--not especially good ideas, but very lively and voluble. He called Sam "sir," which pleased Sam almost as much as
it  embarrassed him. In Zenith, no one except men who had served as officers in the Great War used "sir," save as a furious address to five-year-
old boys whom they were about to beat.

And  suddenly,  after Starling's coming, Lockert was strolling in as though he had never been away, and Lord Herndon was in town for a month and,
without  any very traceable cause, the Dodsworths had more lunches, teas, dinners, dances, and theater parties than even a lady lion-hunter could
have  endured.  Sam  was so happy to see Fran excited and occupied that not for a fortnight did he admit privately that the only thing that bored
him more than being an elephantine wallflower at dances was being a drowsy and food-clogged listener at dinner-parties; and that all these people
whom  they  MUST  call up, whom they simply MUSTN'T forget to invite to their own small dinners, were persons whom he could with cheers never see
again.  Nor  could  he persuade himself that their own affairs (in a private room at the Ritz, with himself pretending to supervise the cocktails
before  dinner  and Fran making a devil of a fuss about the flowers) were any livelier than other people's. The conversation was as cautious, the
bread sauce quite as bready, and the dread hour from nine-thirty to ten-thirty passed on no swifter wings of laughter.

Mr.  A.  B.  Hurd was a relief, now that Fran was busy enough so that Sam could slip away and revel with Mr. Hurd in shop gossip and motor prices
and smutty stories and general American lowness.



Mr.  Hurd  had  done  his  best  to  be  hospitable,  and as it had not occurred to him that there were people, like Fran, who did not wish to be
hospitalitized,  he  had  been  bewildered  and  become  shy--even his superb salesman's confidence had become shy. He had once, after innumerous
telephone  calls,  been  invited  by  Fran to tea, and he had brought his Oklahoma-born wife up from the country and put on his rather antiquated
morning coat and very new spats.

He  came  into the Dodsworths' suite briskly enough, but when Mrs. Hurd crept in after her boisterous husband, Sam was so touched that he rose to
the  courtliness he could occasionally show. She was dressed in blue silk, with a skirt hiked up in back. Her hands looked the more rough because
they  had  just  been  manicured,  with  rosy and pointed nails. Hurd's salary was adequate now, but Sam felt that Mrs. Hurd had for years washed
dishes, diapers, muddy floors. Her lips were round with smiling, but her eyes were frightened as she shook Sam's hand in the small white-enameled
foyer of the suite, and cried:

"My! I've heard so much about you, Mr. Dodsworth! Al is always talking about you and what a wonderful executive you are and what a lovely time he
had  with  you  folks  when he was back in Zenith the last time and how much he enjoyed dining with you and--It's just lovely that you're here in
London  now  and I do hope Mrs. Dodsworth and you will find time to come down to the country and see us. I know how busy you must be with parties
and all but--"

Sam ushered her into the sitting-room; he tried to catch Fran's eye to warn her to be good, while he was rumbling:

"Fran, this is Mrs. Hurd. Mighty great pleasure to meet her, after we've known her husband so long."

"How  d'you  do,  Mrs. Hurd?" said Fran, and it was worthy of Lady Ouston at her politest and rudest. Fran pronounced it "HowjDUH," and her voice
rose at the end in a quiet brusqueness which finished Mrs. Hurd completely.

Mrs.  Hurd fluttered, "I'm real pleased to meet you, I'm sure," then sat forward in her chair, refused the cake she most wanted, looked terrified
while  Fran purred about Paris. She did not venture on the invitation to the country which she had obviously come to deliver. Between Sam's heavy
compliments to Hurd, Hurd's heavy compliments to Sam, and Fran's poisonously sweet manner of saying, "It was so VERY kind of you to come all this
way in to see us, Mrs.--uh--Hurd," she was bewildered, and she ventured on no conversation beyond "My, you've got such lovely rooms here. I guess
you know an awful lot of English folks--lords and everything, don't you?"

After that, Hurd resentfully gave up telephoning.

But  when, with Lockert and Jack Starling returned, Fran found enough of the admiration natural to her, Sam was now and then able to sneak meanly
out and get hold of Hurd for odd meals.

After a fortnight Hurd suggested, at luncheon:

"Say,  Chief, I'd like to pull off a bachelor dinner for you one of these evenings--some of the high-class American business men here in London--
just sit around and be natural and tell our middle names. Think you could duck your good lady and have an Old Home Week? What about next Saturday
evening?"

"Fine. I'll see if my wife has anything on."

"Well, I hope she has. Strict lot of police in this ole town! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!"

Sam  was  not  offended. Hurd was given to smutty limericks, to guffaws about young ladies of the night, yet there was a healthy earthiness about
him  which  to  Sam  was  infinitely  cleaner  than the suave references to perversions which he had increasingly been hearing in New York and in
London,  and  which  sickened  him,  made  him  glad to be normal and provincial and old-fashioned. Hurd--hang it, he liked Hurd! The man's back-
slapping  was  real.  He  could  do with a little back-slapping, these days! Why should it be considered a less worthy greeting than chilly hand-
shakes and fishy "Howjduh's"?

When Sam returned to the hotel, Fran was having tea with Lockert.

"I can tell that you've been seeing one of your jocund American friends again," said Lockert.

"How?"

"You  have  a rather decent voice when you've been under our purely insular influences for a week or so. Color in it. But the moment you slip off
to America again, it sharpens and becomes monotonous."

"'S  too  bad!"  muttered Sam, leaning against the fireplace, very tall, wondering what would happen if he threw his tea--in the cup--at Lockert.
Damn  the  fellow!  Oh,  of  course  he  was  friendly, he meant well, and probably he was right in his hints about the nice conduct of a clouded
American barbarian in England. But still--Hang it, there were some pretty decent people who seemed to like Sam Dodsworth the way he was!

He  interrupted  Fran's  chronicle of shopping and Liberty silks to blurt, "Say, sweet, old Hurd wants to give me a bachelor dinner next Saturday
evening--meet some of the American business men here. I think I ought to do it; he's tried so hard to be nice."

"And you'd like it? Be back in all the Rotarian joys of Zenith?"

"You bet your life I'd like it! We haven't a date for that evening, if I remember. Could you get up a hen party or go to the movies or something?
I'd kind of like--"

"My dear, you don't have to ask permission to have an evening out!"

("The hell I don't!") "No, of course not, but I don't want you to feel stranded."

"I say, Fran," Lockert remarked, "would you care to dine with me that evening and go to the opera?"

"Well--" considered Fran.

"Fine," said Sam. "It's a go."

Jack Starling popped in just then, very cheery, and Sam was silent while the other three hilariously scoffed at America. Sam was thinking, almost
impersonally.  It  was  a  new  occupation  for  him, and he was a little confused. It had become a disease with both nations, he reflected, this
discussion  of Britain vs. America; this incessant, irritated, family scolding. Of course back in the cornfields of the Middlewest, people didn't
often  discuss  it, nor did the villagers on the Yorkshire moors, nor Cornish fishermen. But the people who traveled and met their cousins of the
other nation, the people who fed on newspapers on either side the water, they were all obsessed.

Fran and Lockert and Starling, chirping about it--

They found so much to laugh over--

Himself, he'd rather listen to Hurd's stories--

No.  That wasn't true. He wouldn't. These Londoners (and Fran and Starling were trying to become Londoners) did talk better than the citizenry of
Zenith. They were often a little silly, a little giggling, more than a little spiteful, but they found life more amusing than his business-driven
friends at home.

Couldn't  there be--weren't there people in both England and America who were as enterprising and simple and hearty as Mr. A. B. Hurd, yet as gay
as  Fran or Jack Starling, as curiously learned as Lockert, who between pretenses of boredom gave glimpses of voodoo, of rajahs, of the eager and
credulous boy he had been in public school and through long riverside holidays at his father's vicarage in Berkshire?

Lockert--hang it, must Lockert always be in his thoughts?

It  was true, the thing he had been trying to ignore. The beautiful intimacy which for a fortnight Fran and he had found in their loneliness, her
contentment to be with him and let the world go hang, had thinned and vanished, and she was straining away from him as ardently as ever before.



Mr.  Hurd's  bachelor  dinner  for  Sam  was at eight-thirty. Lockert and Fran left the Ritz at seven, to dine before the opera. Sam saw them off
paternally,  and  most filially Fran cried, "I hope you'll have a beautiful time, Sam, and do give my greetings to Mr. Hurd. I'm sure he's really
quite  a  good  soul,  really." But she did not look back to wave at him as he watched them down the corridor to the lift. She had tucked her arm
into Lockert's; she was chattering, altogether absorbed.

For an hour Sam tramped the apartment, too lonely to think.



Hurd's  dinner  was  given  in  a private room at the Dindonneau Restaurant in Soho. There was a horseshoe table with seats for thirty. Along the
table  little  American  flags were set in pots of forget-me-nots. Behind the chairman 's table was a portrait of President Coolidge, draped with
red,  white  and  blue  bunting,  and about the wall--Heaven knows where Hurd could have collected them all--were shields and banners of Yale and
Harvard  and  the  University  of  Winnemac, of the Elks, the Oddfellows, the Moose, the Woodmen, of the Rotarians, the Kiwanians, and the Zenith
Chamber of Commerce, with a four-sheet poster of the Revelation car.

Fran would have sneered. . . .

Outside  was the dark and curving Soho alley, with the foggy lights of a Singhalese restaurant, a French book-shop, a wig-maker's, an oyster bar.
And  the  room  was violently foreign, with frescoes by a sign-painter--or a barn-painter: Isola Bella, Fiesole, Castel Sant' Angelo. But Sam did
not  look at them. He--who but once in his life had attended a Rotary lunch--looked at the Rotary wheel, and his smile was curiously timid. There
was no reason for it apparent to him, but suddenly these banners made him feel that in the chill ignobility of exile he was still Some One.

He felt the more Some One as he was introduced to the guests.

They  had  spent  from  a  month  to thirty years in England, and they were as different one from another as the exhibits at a Zoo, with the lion
beside the monkey-cage. Yet in all of them was a hint of American heartiness and of that twang which is called "talking through the nose" because
it  consists  in  failing  to talk through the nose. There was Stubbs of the Haymarket branch of the Pittsburgh and Western National Bank, a gray
solid  man  of  fifty,  fanatic about golf. Young Ertman, the London correspondent of the Chicago Register, once a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, very
select and literary. Young Suffern of the Baltimore Eagle, very red-faced and wide-shouldered and noisy. Doblin, manager of the English agency of
the  Lightfoot  Sewing  Machine  Agency,  old  and thread-thin and gentle. Markart of the Orient Chewing Gum and Chicle Corporation; Knabe of the
Serial  Cash  Registers; Fish of the American Forwarding Company; Smith of the Internation Tourist Agency; Nutthal of the Anglo-Peruvian Bank--he
was  Lancashire  born  but  he  had lived in Omaha for eighteen years and he was three hundred per cent. American. And a throng of American motor
agents.

Each of them crunched Sam's hand and growled (only the Rhodes scholar's growl was more feline than canine): "Certainly is a mighty great pleasure
to meet you. Staying over here long?"

Near  the  door  was  a  side-table  spread  with  Martini cocktails, Manhattan cocktails, Bronx cocktails, and bottles of Scotch, Canadian Club,
American  rye  and  Bourbon.  Sam  could  not escape without four cocktails, and when he wavered to his seat beside A. B. Hurd, he had altogether
forgotten that he had ever been lonely, that Fran was with Lockert.

There  was  a  deal  of  noisy humor at the dinner; a deal of shouting the length of the table; a number of stories beginning "Jever hear the one
about  the  two  Jews--"  And  it must be said that Sam, privileged now to enjoy the suburbs of correct English society, enjoyed it more than any
dinner  this  fortnight. He enjoyed it even when cognac and whisky sodas followed the dessert and some of the guests--free for only one evening a
week  from  the American wives whom living in England had not weakened in their view of women's right to forbid men's rights--snatched the excuse
to  get quite reasonably drunk and to soar into American melody: "The Old Man Came Rolling Home," and "He Laid Jesse James in His Grave" and "Way
Down  on  the  Bingo  Farm,"  with  what they conceived to be a correct Cockney version of "She Was Poor but She Was Honest," all of them leading
triumphantly up to:


My  name  is  Yon  Yonson, I come from Visconsin, I vork on a lumberyard dere, Ven I go down de street All de people I meet Dey saaaaaaay, "Vot's
your name?" And I sa-aaaaay: My name is Yon Yonson, I come from Visconsin--


It seemed a good song, at a certain stage of liquor, and they kept it up for ten minutes.

But  between such high lights, Sam Dodsworth got in a seminar of inquiries about the question that to him, also, had become a disease: Is America
the Rome of the world, or is it inferior to Britain and Europe? Or confusedly both?

Out  of  all  the  thirty,  there  were  not  ten  whose  speech showed that they had lived abroad. If occasionally they said "braces" instead of
"suspenders,"  or  "two  bob"  instead of "four bits," you would have supposed that they had been reading English fiction. There were not six who
would ever have been taken for Englishmen by Americans, and not three who would have been taken for Englishmen by Englishmen.

Yet there were not more than six, Sam discovered incredulously, who wanted to return to America for the rest of their lives.

He  had understood that hybrid cosmopolites with a fancy for titles and baccarat, eccentric artists who were fond of mistresses and chess, idlers
who  needed  some  one with whom to loaf, might prefer to live abroad. But that this should be true of the gallant thirty--good salesmen, up-and-
coming authorities on cash registers and motor tires--was disturbing to him, and mystifying.

These  men  believed, and belligerently announced, that America was the "greatest country in the world," not only in its resources and increasing
population  and  incomparable  comforts  of  daily  life,  not  only  in  its energy and mechanical ingenuity, but equally in its generosity, its
friendliness, its humor, its aspiration for learning. Scarce one of them, Sam judged, but longed to see his own beloved quarter of America--

New  York  on  a  winter  night,  with the theaters blaring and the apartment-houses along Park Avenue vanishing up into the wild sky rosy from a
million  lights. Vermont on an autumn afternoon, with the maples like torches. Midsummer in Minnesota, where the cornfields talked to themselves,
and  across miles of rolling wheatland, dimpling to the breeze, you saw the tall red wheat-elevators and the spire of the German Catholic Church.
The grave silence of the wilderness: plateaus among the scarred peaks of the Sierra Nevadas, painted buttes in Arizona, Wisconsin lakes caressing
in  dark  waters  the  golden  trunks  of Norway pines. The fan-lights above serene old Connecticut doorways in Litchfield and Sharon. Proud cold
sunsets  in  the  last  five  minutes of the Big Game at Thanksgiving-time--Illinois vs. Chicago, Yale vs. Harvard--yes, and quite as aching with
sentimental  and unforgettable and lost sweetness, Schnutz College vs. Maginnis Agricultural School. Cities of a quarter of a million people with
fantastic  smoky  steel  works,  like maniac cathedrals, which had arisen in twenty years upon unpeopled sand-barrens. The long road and a rather
shaggy,  very  adventurous  family  in  a  squeaky flivver, the new Covered Wagon, starting out to see all the world from Seattle to Tallahassee,
stopping to earn their bacon and bread and oil by harvesting; singing at night in tourist camps on the edge of wide-lawned towns--

"I certainly do like to get back to Alabama--mighty nice girls there, and you talk about your Georgia terrapin--say, listen, boy," said Stubbs of
the Pittsburgh and Western National Bank, "we got the swellest food in the world in Alabama."

And  Primble  of  the International Films Distributing Agency drawled, "Just about once a year I certainly got to get back to the Ozark Mountains
and go fishing."

But  except  for half a dozen homesick souls, each of them admitted that he was going to go on loving, boosting, and admiring America, and remain
in Europe as long as he could.

Their  confessions  could have been summed up in the ruminations of Doblin, pro-consul of sewing-machines, doyen of the American business-colony,
old  and  thread-thin  and  gentle,  who  murmured (while the others listened, nodding, nervously shaking ashes from cigarettes, or holding their
cigars cocked in the corners of their mouths):

"Well, I'll tell you the way I look at it personally. Strikes me that one-half or maybe two-thirds of the American people are the best fellows on
earth--the  friendliest  and  the most interested in everything and the jolliest. And I guess the remaining third are just about the worst crabs,
the  worst  Meddlesome  Matties, the most ignorant and pretentious fools, that God ever made. Male AND female! I'd be tickled to death to live in
America IF. If we got rid of Prohibition, so a man could get a glass of beer instead of being compelled to drink gin and hootch. If we got rid of
taking  seriously  a  lot  of  self-advertising,  half-educated  preachers and editors and politicians, so that folks would develop a little real
thinking  instead  of being pushed along by a lot of mental and moral policemen. If our streets weren't so God-awfully noisy. If there were a lot
more  cafes  and a lot less autos--sorry, Mr. Dodsworth, you being a motor-manufacturer, but that slipped out and I guess I'll just have to stand
by it.

"But  the  whole thing, the fundamental thing, is a lot harder to express than that. Nothing like so simple as just Prohibition. . . . Golly, the
number  of  people  who  think  they are getting profound when they talk about that one question! . . . The whole thing--Oh, there's more ease in
living  here!  Your  neighbors don't spy on you and gossip and feel it's their business to tell you how to live, way we do at home. Not that I've
got anything to hide. I haven't been drunk for thirty years. I've been true to my wife--unless you count one time when I kissed a little widow on
the Baltic, and by golly that's as far as it went! But if there's one thing that would make me go out for all the vices I ever heard of, it would
be  the thought of a lot of morality hounds sneaking after me all the time, the way they do in the States. And you get better servants here--yes,
and  the servants themselves like their work a deuce of a sight better than our red-neck hired girls in America, because they're skilled, they're
respected  here,  they're  secure,  they  don't  have the womenfolks nosing into their ice-boxes and love-letters all day long! And business--Our
greatest  American  myth  is  that  we're  so  much  more  efficient than these Britishers and the folks on the Continent. All this high-pressure
salesmanship  bunk!  Why say, I'll bet that stuff antagonizes more customers than it ever catches. And over here, they simply won't stand for it!
An Englishman knows what he wants to buy, and he don't intend to be bullied into buying something else. And a Scotsman knows what he doesn't want
to  buy!  Half  our  efficiency  is  just  running  around and making a lot of show and wasting time. I always picture the ideal 'peppy' American
business man as a fellow who spends half his time having his letters filed away and the other half trying to find 'em again. And then--Englishman
don't feel he's virtuous because he spends a lot of extra time in his office not doing anything special. He goes home early and gets in some golf
or  tennis  or  some  gardening. Might even read a book! And he's got a hobby, so that when he retires he has something to do; doesn't just waste
away from being bored to death when he's old, the way we do.

"The  Englishman will work, and work hard, but he doesn't fall for the nonsense that work--any kind of work, for any purpose--is noble in itself.
Why, when I go home--Well, there's old Emmanuel White, president of my company. He's seventy-two years old, and he's never taken a vacation. He's
worth  two million dollars, and he gets to the office at eight, and sometimes he stays there till eleven at night and goes snooping around to see
if  anybody's  left a light turned on. Maybe he gets some fun out of it, but he sure doesn't look like it. He looks like he lived on vinegar, and
to  have  a  conference with him is just about as pleasant as tending a sick tiger. And the fellows of forty and forty-five that never relax even
when they do take an afternoon off--they drive like hell out to a golf course. Greatest myth in the world!

"But  we're beginning to learn a little bit about leisure at home, I guess. That makes me hopeful that some day we may even get cured of optimism
and  oratory.  But I don't expect it in my time, and you bet your sweet life I'm going to stay on here in England, even after I retire. Say! I've
got  a little place in Surrey, with an acre of ground and a rose garden. But I'm American, just's American as I ever was. And, thank God, there's
enough  Americans  here  so  I  can see a lot of 'em. I admire the English, but they make me feel kind of roughneck. But LIVE here--you bet! Say,
that's  one  of  the  best  proofs  that America is the greatest country in the world: Paris and London have become two of the nicest of American
cities! Yes sir!"



Sam  was  rather  bewildered.  Doblin  was  the  old-fashioned, Yankee, suramerican sort whom he preferred to all the strident new evangelists of
business.

He  was  more  bewildered  when Fish of the American Forwarding Company--big jovial Fish, who had played center for the University of the Western
Conference--chuckled:

"You  bet!  First  year  I was here, I was homesick all the time. I went home, and I intended to stay there. Well, I lasted just one year in that
dear  old  Chicago!  God,  the  Loop,  the  elevated,  driving  through that traffic out to Wilmette every evening, the eternal yow-yow-yow about
investments and bridge! Didn't even enjoy golf! Golly, fellows worked at it! Felt guilty as hell if they were one stroke over yesterday! And most
of  'em  took up playing to get acquainted with possible customers at the club--sell 'em eighteen bonds in eighteen holes. I got transferred back
here.  I  guess  I'd enlist to fight for America against any blooming country in the world, but--Maybe America will get civilized. I hope so. I'm
going  to  send  both my boys back home to American universities, and then let 'em decide whether they want to remain or come back here. Maybe we
ought to stay home and fight the blue-noses, not let 'em exile us. But life's short. Want to be a good patriot, but--Say! I wish you could see my
house  in Chelsea--twenty minutes from Trafalgar Square, even in one of these non-motorized London taxis, and yet it's as quiet as a hick town in
Nebraska. Quieter! Because there's no kids drinking gin and hollering in flivvers, and no evangelist in the big tent raising hell. Yes SIR!"



Sam was pondering.

He  was  coming  to  like  England. Perhaps he really would live here. Take an interest in some motor agency. Have an Elizabethan black-and-white
house  in  Kent,  with  ten  acres.  Join  the  American  Club. These were good fellows--perhaps there were three or four who would even pass the
censorship  of  Fran.  He  would not be lonely here. He would learn leisure. And think of getting old Tub to come over for a while in the summer!
Trot all round England and Scotland with Tub in a car--play golf at St. Andrews--

Yes.

But  he  recalled the horrors of an arty tea to which Jack Starling had taken them in St. John's Wood. He recalled the tedium of dinner-parties--
people  dining solitarily in public. He recalled his discomfort in being unable to understand the violent differences between an Oxford man and a
graduate of the University of London, between a public school man and one who abysmally was not. And yet--There was SOMETHING about life here--

He didn't feel that he had to hustle, when he walked the London streets. He didn't, just now, want to return to an office in Zenith and listen to
vehement  young men who made Patrick Henry orations about windshield-wipers; he didn't long again to study the schedules of a company which would
provide seat-upholstery at.06774 cents cheaper a yard, or to listen to Doc Wimpole, the cut-up of the golf club, in his Swedish imitations or his
celebrated way of greeting you:

"Well, here's the old cut-throat! How many widows and orphans have you stuck with your rotten old Revs this week?"

No!

He  went  home,  after tremendously cordial handshakings, more blissful about his new role of required adventurousness than ever before . . . and
hoping that Fran would not say, "Did you have an agreeable time with the great American commercial intellects?"

She  would!  She'd  wake  up, no matter how softly he came into the bedroom, and she'd say--(He had it all out, there in the taxicab.) She'd say,
"Well, I hope you enjoyed yourself with Mr. Hurd and all the other hearty Rotarians!"

"Now  you  look  here!  I  heard  more  good  talk tonight, more talk that really got down to cases, than I've heard at any of your dinners where
gentlemen try to talk like Members of Parliament and Members of Parliament try to talk like gentlemen--"

"Why, my dear Sam, we're becoming positively literary! The influence of dear Mr. Hurd is astonishing! Was his wife there? She'd do perfectly at a
bachelor dinner!"

"Now  you  look  here!  I  know what a profound scholar you are, and I know I'm a roughneck business man, but may I remind you that I did go to a
quite well-known institution for young gentlemen in New Haven, and I have actually read several books, and furthermore--"

It was a complete triumph, there in the taxicab.

He came radiantly into their suite. On the couch, crushing her golden evening wrap, Fran lay sobbing.

He gaped from the doorway five full seconds before he chucked his opera hat at the table, dashed to her, plumped down on the couch, and cried:

"What is it? Sweet! What is it?"

She convulsively raised her face just enough to burrow it against his knee while she whimpered:

"I've  always said--oh, damn!--I've always said it was really a compliment to a woman to be what they call 'insulted.' Well, maybe it is, but oh,
Sam, I don't like it! I DON'T! Oh, I want to go home! Or anyway leave England. I can't face it. Probably it was my fault that--

"No,  it wasn't! I swear it wasn't! I never gave him the slightest, littlest excuse to suppose that His Grace--Oh, God, how I hate that man! He's
so  supercilious,  and  what about? I ask you, what about? What is the fool after all but a failure, an international hobo? Even if his cousin IS
the real thing! What is he? I ask you!

"It  was  like  this. Oh, Sam, Sam darling, I hate to tell you, because I must have been at fault--partly. It was after the opera. I suggested to
Clyde--to  Major  Lockert--that we might go somewhere and dance, but he said all the good places were so noisy--couldn't we just come up here and
have  a  drink and talk. I didn't mind; I was a little tired. Well, at first, he was awfully nice. (Oh, I can see his line so clearly now, and it
wasn't so bad, considering!) He sat--he sat right there in that chair--he sat there and he talked about his boyhood and how lonely he'd been. And
you  know  what a fool I am about children--you know how I suffer at just the least little suggestion of anybody not having a happy childhood. Of
course  I almost cried. And then he said he was terribly inarticulate and shy (oh yes!) but he wanted to tell me how much it'd meant to know me--
I'd  been a sweet feminine influence--honestly, I think he used just those words!--of course he doesn't have a sweet feminine influence more than
two or three times a week!--you can imagine the kind of Indian girls he tells that to on his plantation!--how I hate him!

"But  anyway,  he  told  me what a regular little sister I'd been to him, and--being seven kinds of a fool, as you know--I fell for it, and first
thing  I  knew,  he  was  sitting  here  on the couch beside me, holding my hand. And I confess--Oh, I'm being terribly frank! If you ever are so
beastly  as  to  go and use this against me later, I'll KILL you, I swear I will! . . . I didn't mind the hand-holding a bit. . . . Am I a hussy?
I'm  afraid I could become one! . . . But anyway--I mean: He has some electricity about him; he's a very educated hand-holder; not too tight, and
yet he sort of makes you shudder--

"But  anyway,  he held my hand as though it were some particularly sacred relic. And he went on telling me that my example had persuaded him that
he must stop wandering and settle down with some glorious girl like me. And I believed it all! I felt like a Sister by a dying bedside!

"But  anyway,  he  was going to cut out all this drifting and really do something with life. He SAID that! 'Do something with life!' I might have
known!

"And then--

"Oh,  you  know  what he said! I don't have to tell you. Probably you've said it to some cutie yourself! Only, if I ever catch you doing it, I'll
KILL  you!  You  and  I  are  the  model  monogamists from now on, d'you understand? Anyway, you can guess what he said. Where was he to find the
admirable spouse who'd be exactly like me?

"And of course I made noises like a purr-pussy!

"And  the  next  thing I knew, he'd thrown his arms around me, and he was trying to kiss me, and he was at the same time trying to inform me that
I'd  led  him  on--Oh,  I  can sound funny about it, now, or try to, anyway. But it was pretty fairly ghastly. The idiot insisted on doing a real
'Woman,  you have tempted me to perdition with your poisoned smile' sort of melodrama. Oh, Sam, Sam, Sam dear--you old darling! You're so DECENT!
But I mean: When he found that I was most certainly not going to be embraced, he got awfully nasty. That's one thing he does do well! He said I'd
led  him on. He said that among 'civilized people' there were 'rules of the game,' and the way I'd let him kiss my shoulder--Oh yes, he did that,
too,  in  the  taxicab  going  to dinner. Oh, I AM being frank, probably disastrously frank! But, dear, don't treasure it up and use it against a
pitiful  fool  that  thought she was a woman of the world! And honestly, I really and truly did think, when he kissed my shoulder, that if I just
ignored  it  he'd  have  sense  enough  to  see  that  I  wasn't taking any. 'Rules of the game among civilized people!' The fool! As if I didn't
understand them just as well as he does, and maybe a lot better! But anyway--

"And maybe I LIKED his kissing my shoulder! Oh, I don't know! I don't know ANYTHING, after this ghastly evening! But anyway:

"He  said  it  was  my  fault, and so on and so forth--you can imagine--and then he saw that he couldn't bully me, and he was terribly apologetic
about  'showing  his  true  feelings'--the  swine  hasn't got any true feelings! Anyway, he kissed my ear and my nose--a rotten marksman!--and he
pleaded and--Oh, I don't know why you should have to listen to all the ghastly details! Anyway, I kicked him out, and he--oh, he was charming, my
dear!--he  went  back  to  his delightful assertion that all American women are bloodless rotters, who get a kick out of seeing men make fools of
themselves and--

"Oh,  oh yes, and he also said this. This really WAS pretty, and it'll interest you particularly! Though it certainly wasn't very consistent with
his bleat about my being a bloodless siren! He said--he made it quite clear that he didn't merely expect a few consoling kisses, and he said that
I didn't know how much sex passion there was concealed in me. He said that you--he was so kind as to indicate that you were a worthy motor-pedler
and  quite  a  nice  kind  friend, and probably you could defend yourself if you were attacked by bandits, but you had no sexual fire--'spiritual
fire'--I  think  he  said, to be exact--and I was what he called 'unawakened,' and he was willing--bless his dear, kind, neighborly soul!--he was
willing to do the awakening.

"Oh, Sam, I'm trying to be funny about it, but actually I've never been so insulted, so hurt, so horribly misunderstood, so innocent--

"Or do YOU think I led him on, too?"



Through  all  her  vehement chronicle, Sam had been sorry for her, most successfully; he had tried to agree with her, not very successfully; and,
while he stroked her hair, he had studied a print on the wall.

He  had  not,  till  now, been very conscious of their sitting-room. But in these seconds he so concentrated on it that he could never forget one
minutest  detail:  the walls, cornflower blue; the ceiling, dull gold; a wing chair in cretonne with cabbage roses; the mahogany escritoire, with
elegant  books  of  English memoirs, recently purchased by Fran, on the shelves above the writing tablet, on which she had made neat piles of the
chaste  Ritz  stationery and the letters which were now beginning to come from home. The low table for tea, with the old silver tea-service which
she  had  excitedly purchased on Bond Street. He was touched by the homemaking which she was always doing in hotel suites. But most of all he had
been  inattentively  absorbed  by  the  colored print on the wall opposite him. It wasn't any print in particular. It was what any aged and semi-
literate  artist  would do. Yet at this sensitive moment it was fascinating to Sam, this picture of a young gallant, rather leggy in tights, bent
over a young woman with a smile and a flowery hat, against a background of towers and roses.

He roused himself from the study of it as he heard her demand, "Or do you think I led him on?"

"No. I'm sure you didn't, Fran. But still--"

Suddenly he had no control over what he was saying; no relation to the man who was saying it:

"Oh, God, I'm so tired! Tired!"

"If you don't think I'M tired!"

"Look here, Fran. I'm not awfully accustomed to dealing with little lovers in the home. I haven't had that sort of life. Oh, I know you never had
any idea of Lockert's taking your friendliness for love-making. He was a swine. I suppose it's up to me to go out and shoot him."

"Oh, don't be silly!"

"Well,  I  would  feel  a good deal like a fool, but if you want me to--" He had been warning himself not to say what he thought. Suddenly he was
saying it:

"But  as  a  matter  of  fact,  I don't entirely blame Lockert. You were flirting with him--you were doing it down at Lord Herndon's--even on the
steamer  you  acted  as if he was running the whole show for you. And he had some excuse for thinking he could grab you off. You have such a nice
way of bawling me out right in his presence; you say, 'Do try to remember that Lady What's-her-name isn't used to Americans, and don't talk about
Zenith,'  and  so  on and so on, until you've got me as nervous as an ammeter, till I feel like a Middlewestern bull in a Bond Street china shop,
and Lockert listens to it, and naturally he supposes that you think I'm a fool, while he's ace-high and--"

"Are there any other capital crimes that I've committed?"

"Yes.  A  few.  You enjoy highhatting Hurd and decent fellows like that--you're so blame' courteous they feel like stable-boys--you play with 'em
like  a cat with a mouse--and Lockert's heard you doing it, and he sees you turning toward him for approval, and he thinks you think that he's so
superior to me and my friends--"

"Now  you  listen  to  ME! I deny everything you say! I have NEVER nagged you! I have NEVER said anything to embarrass you! I think even YOU will
admit  that in some things I have slightly more tact and patience than you have! And then out of pure friendliness, entirely for your own sake, I
try  to help you to understand people that you've misjudged, and you say I've bullied you! Oh, it's perfectly beastly of you! And idiotic! If you
wouldn't  fly off the handle so easily, if you'd listen and let me help you, perhaps you wouldn't make such perfectly appalling breaks as you did
the night when you insulted Lady Ouston and made everybody so frightfully uncomfortable--"

"But you backed me up! You said I was right!"

"Naturally! I said it out of loyalty to you. I'm always loyal to you. I've never yet failed you in that--or in anything else!"

"Oh,  haven't  you!  I  suppose  you  call  it  loyalty to be constantly hinting and suggesting that I'm merely an ignorant business man, whereas
anybody--ANYBODY!--that  has  an  English  or French accent, any loafer living on women, is a gentleman and scholar! After all, I have managed to
deal with a few European importers without feeling--"

"Go on! Explain that you're the great Herr Geheimrat General-direktor! That you invented and developed the entire motor industry! It's all so new
and interesting! Oh, I've never wanted to say it, Sam, but you force me to! I have no question but that you've done well. There are very few more
impressive  people--in  Zenith!  But  it happens that we are not in your dear Zenith, just now, but in England, and there are several things here
that  you  don't  know  so much about, and that I do know! After all, this isn't my first trip to Europe! But you're too self-important to let me
teach  you!  I  certainly do not mean to hint that you're ill bred or common, but really--I hate to have to tell you this!--you certainly do seem
vulgar and ill bred to people who don't understand you--"

"To Lockert, I suppose!"

"--and  to  people  who venture to believe that the great tradition of Europe is slightly superior to the pep and hustle of Zenith! I could teach
you that tradition, but you won't let me--"

"I suppose you're an authority!"

"I  certainly  am, comparatively! After all, I have been in Europe before! And my father's house was always full of Europeans. And I've read more
French and German and British books, these twenty years, than you have detective stories! They accept me here. Oh, Sam, if you'd only let me help
you--"

"My  dear  child,  you  can't  at the same time pan me for my vulgarity and be the tender little mother! That's too damn' much to stand! And as a
matter of fact, when it comes to vulgarity--Now where the devil are all the cigarettes?"

Instantly it was more important to find the cigarettes without which no real smoker can be comfortable and emotional and quarrel actively than it
was to enjoy the pain of hatred. They suspended battle to join in the hunt. He turned out his dinner-jacket, rammed his hands into the pockets of
his  overcoat,  and  yanked out bureau drawers, while she popped up from the couch to look triumphantly--then bleakly--into the black and scarlet
Russian box which she had bought yesterday.

"And  another  thing--another  thing--But  where  ARE  those  cigarettes?  I  know I had half a package of Gold Flakes left, and some Camels," he
muttered, as he searched.

It  was  she  who thought of telephoning to the office; she who felt that she knew how to use servants, at no matter what time of night, while he
would always be Americanishly shy of them.

She  sat  on  the  edge of the couch, she smoothed her skirt, she bent her head with irritating graciousness to receive a light from him when the
cigarettes had come, and graciously, most irritatingly, she said:

"Sam,  I  hate to have to point it out again, but it really doesn't get you very far in a discussion to lose your temper and use big, strong, he-
man  words  like  'damn'  and  'the  devil.' They aren't so awfully novel and startling to me! And as usual, you're merely missing the point. I'm
neither  'panning'  you, as you so elegantly put it, nor am I trying to mother you. I'm always willing to listen to your opinions on golf and how
to invest my money. I merely expect you to admit that there may be a few things in which the poor ignorant female may know a little bit more than
you  do!  Oh,  you're  like  all  the other American men! You speak no known language. You don't know Rodin from Mozart. You have no idea whether
France  or  England controls Syria. You--you, the motor expert!--can never remember whether a lady should be on your right or your left in a car.
You're  bored  equally  by Bach and Antheil. You're bored by going with me to shop for the most divine Russian embroidery. You can't fence with a
pretty  woman  at  dinner.  And--But those are just symptoms! Separately, they don't matter. The thing is that you haven't the mistiest notion of
what  European  civilization  is,  basically--of  how  the  tradition  of  leisure, honor, gallantry, inherent cultivation, differs from American
materialism. And you don't want to learn. You never COULD be European--"

"Fran! Stop sneering!"

"I am not sneer--"

"Stop  it!  Dear! I don't pretend to have any of these virtues. I guess it's perfectly true: I never could become European. But why should I? I'm
American,  and glad of it. And you know I never try to prevent your being as European as you want to. But don't take out your soreness at Lockert
on me. Please!"

His encircling arms said more, and he nestled her head on his shoulder while she sobbed:

"I know. I'm sorry. But oh--"

She sat up, spoke resolutely.

"I'm  terribly ashamed about this Lockert business. Shamed right down through me. I can't stand it! Sam, I want to leave England at once. I can't
stand staying in this country with that man, thinking he's here laughing at me. Or else I WILL be asking you to go out and shoot him, and the law
here is so prejudiced! I want to leave for France. NOW!"

"But golly, Fran, I like this country! I'm getting to know London. I like it here. France'll be so foreign."

"Precisely!  I  want  it to be! I want to start all over. I won't make a fool of myself again. Oh, Sam, darling, let's run away, like two school-
children,  hand  in  hand! And think! The joy of seeing blue siphons and brioches and kiosks and red sashes and red-plush wall-seats and fat lady
cashiers! And hearing 'B'jour, M'sieu et Madame,' the way they say it when you're leaving a shop--like a little bell! Let's go!"

"Well, I did intend to see some aeroplane factories here. Fact I had a date--"

They went to Paris in four days.



The  Channel steamer seemed to him like a greyhound--small, slim, power evident in its squat thick funnel. The delight of sea-faring which he had
found  on  the  Atlantic came to him again in the narrow gangways 'tween decks, suggesting speed in their sharp curve toward the bow. When he had
established Fran in a chair on the boat deck, amid piles of snobbish blond luggage, he slipped down to the bar.

There  is  about a ship's bar, any bar of any ship, however small, a cheerfulness unknown elsewhere in life's dark and Methodist vale. It has the
snug security of an English inn, with a suggestion of adventure as the waves flicker past the port-holes, as you speculate about the passengers--
men  coming from China and Brazil and Saskatchewan, men going to Italy and Liberia and Siam. As he clumped up to join Fran, Sam forgot, in waxing
anticipation  of  the  Continent,  his regret for England, and he kept that anticipation even while he listened on deck to a proper cross-Channel
conversation among a ripe Wiltshire vicar, his aunt, and his aunt's dear friend, Mrs. Illingworth-Dobbs:

"Oh yes, we shall stop in Florence most of the time."

"Shall you stop at the Stella Rossa ancora una volta?"

"No,  I  really  think  we  shall  stop  at  Mrs. Brown-Bloater's pension. You know we've always stopped at the Stella Rossa, but it's really too
outrageous. Last year they began to charge extra for tea!"

"Extra? For TEA?"

"Yes.  And  it  used  to  be  quite  nice there! The guests were people one could know. But now it's filled with Jews and Americans and unmarried
couples and even Germans!"

"Dreadful! But Florence is so lovely."

"Charming!"

"So artistic!"

"Yes, so artistic. And Sir William is taking a villa there for the season."

"I say, that will be jolly for you."

"Si, si! Sara una cosa veramente--uh--really charming. Sir William is SO fond of the artistic. It will be quite like home, having him there. _And
I have heard definitely from Mrs. Brown-Bloater that she is not charging extra for tea_!"



Sam  forgot  the prospect of a Continent full of Mrs. Illingworth-Dobbses; he even forgot, in the zest of the steamer's speed, Fran's fretfulness
that  the  boat  was  going up and down a good deal, for which she seemed to feel that he was to blame. The bow hit the waves like a mailed fist.
There  was  just  enough motion to show that he really was at sea, and as they left the English coast and cut into the fresh breeze, they plunged
past foreign-looking craft: a French steam-trawler lurching up the Channel, with meaty little sailors in striped jerseys waving at them, a German
coaster, a Dutch East Indiaman, rolling through the sun-crisped tide.

The sailors who passed their deck chairs, the officers on the bridge, they were all so sturdy, so mahogany-faced, so reliable, so British.

A  man  with  a  long  blond mustache and a monocle strolled past. Fran insisted that he was Thomas Cook, of the Sons. And what was Karl Baedeker
like?  she  speculated. Short and square, with a short square brown beard and double-thick spectacles through which he peered at menus and ruined
temples and signs reading "Roma 3 chilometri."

"Yes,  and  what  is Mr. Bass like? And the Haig Brothers? I wonder if they're like the Smith Brothers," said Sam, and, "Gosh, I'm enjoying this,
Fran!"

Then he saw a pale line, which was the coast of France.



But  he  tramped  aft,  to look back toward England. He fancied that he could see the shadow of its cliffs. Doubtless it was a distant cloud-bank
that he saw, but he imagined the cool and endearing hills, the welcoming crooked streets, the wholesome faces.

"England!  Perhaps  I'll  never  see  it  again.  .  .  . Fran and Lockert, they've taken it from me. . . . But I love it. America is my wife and
daughter,  but England is my mother. And these fools talk about a possible war between Britain and America! If that ever came--I thought Debs was
foolish  to go to jail as a protest against war, but I guess I understand better how he felt now. 'If I forget thee, O England, let my right hand
forget  her  cunning,  if I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.' How did that go, in chapel? Oh yes: 'If I prefer
not  Jerusalem--London--above  my  chief  joy'!  Well. I never could prefer England above America. But next to America--Oh, Lord, I'd liked to've
stayed there! The Dodsworths were in England three thousand years, maybe, where they've been in America only three hundred.

"England!"

Then he turned eagerly toward France.

They crept into harbor, past the breakwater with its tiny lighthouses, bumped along a rough stone pier, saw advertisements of strange drinks in a
strange  language,  and  were  flooded  with  small,  shrieking, blue-bloused porters; heard children speaking French as though it were a natural
language; and for the first time in his life Samuel Dodsworth was in the grasp of a real Foreign Land.

CHAPTER 12


Sam had remained calm amid the frenzy of a Detroit Automobile Show; he had stalked through the crush of a New Year's Eve on Broadway, merely
brushing off the bright young men with horns and feather ticklers; but in the Calais customs-house he was appalled. The porters shrieked
ferocious things like "attonshion" as they elbowed past, walking mountains of baggage; the passengers jammed about the low baggage platform; the
customs inspectors seemed to Sam cold-eyed and hostile; all of them bawled and bleated and wailed in what sounded to him like no language
whatever; and he remembered that he had four hundred cigarettes in his smaller bag.

The porter who had taken their bags on the steamer had shouted something that sounded like "catravan deuce"--Fran said it meant that he was
Porter Number Ninety-two. Then Catravan Deuce had malignantly disappeared, with their possessions. Sam knew that it was all right, but he didn't
believe it. He assured himself that a French porter was no more likely to steal their bags than a Grand Central red-cap--only, he was quite
certain that Catravan Deuce had stolen them. Of course he could replace everything except Fran's jewelry without much expense but--Damn it, he'd
hate to lose his old red slippers--

He was disappointed at so flabby an ending when he found Catravan Deuce at his elbow in the customs room, beaming in a small bearded way and
shouldering aside the most important passengers to plank their baggage down on the platform for examination.

Sam was proud of Fran's French (of Stratford, Connecticut) when the capped inspector said something quite incomprehensible and she answered with
what sounded like "ree-an." He felt that she was a scholar; he felt that he was untutored and rusty; he depended on her admiringly. And then he
opened the smaller bag and the four hundred cigarettes were revealed to the inspector.

The inspector looked startled, he gaped, he spread out his arms, and protested in the name of liberty, equality, fraternity, and indemnities.
Fran tried to answer, but her French stumbled and fell, and she turned to Sam, all her airy competence gone, wailing, "I can't understand what he
says! He--he talks patois!"

At her appeal, Sam suddenly became competent, ready to face the entire European Continent, with all appertaining policemen, laws, courts, and
penitentiaries.

"Here! I'll get somebody!" he assured her, and to the customs inspector, who was now giving a French version of the Patrick Henry oration, he
remarked, "Just a MO-ment! Keep your shirt on!"

He had a notion of finding the English vicar to whom he had listened on the Channel steamer. "Fellow seems to know European languages." He
wallowed through the crowd as though he were making a touch-down, and saw on a cap the thrice golden words "American Express Company." The
American Express man beamed and leaped forward at something in the manner with which Mr. Samuel Dodsworth of the Revelation Motor Company
suggested, "Can you come and do a little job of interpreting for me?" . . . Sam felt that for a moment he was being Mr. Samuel Dodsworth, and not
Fran Dodsworth's husband. . . . And for something less than a moment he admitted that he was possibly being the brash Yankee of Mark Twain and
Booth Tarkington. And he could not successfully be sorry for it.

The American Express man saw them on the waiting train (a very bleak and tall and slaty train it seemed to Sam); he prevented Sam from tipping
the porter enough to set him up in a shop. And so Sam and Fran were alone in a compartment, safe again till Paris.

Sam chuckled, "Say, I guess I'll have to learn the French for two phrases: 'How much?' and 'Go to hell.' But--Sweet! We're in France--in Europe!"

She smiled at him; she let him off and didn't even rebuke him for his Americanism. They sat hand in hand, and they were more intimately happy
than since the day they had sailed from America. They were pleased by everything: by the battery of red and golden bottles on their table at
lunch, by the deftness with which the waiter sliced the cone of ice cream, by the mysterious widow who was trying to pick up the mysterious
Frenchman who combined a checked suit and a red tie with a square black beard--such a beard, murmured Fran, as it was worth crossing the Atlantic
to behold.



He was stimulated equally by the "foreignness" of the human spectacle flickering past the window of their compartment--women driving ox-carts,
towns with sidewalk cafes, and atrocious new houses of yellow brick between lumpy layers of stone picked out in red mortar--and the lack of
"foreignness" in the land itself. Somehow it wasn't quite right that French trees and grass should be of the same green, French earth of the same
brown, French sky of the same blue, as in a natural, correct country like America. After the tight little fenced fields of England, the wide
Picardy plains, green with approaching April, seemed to him extraordinarily like the prairies of Illinois and Iowa. If it was a little
disappointing, not quite right and decent after he had gone and taken so long and expensive a journey, yet he was pleased by that sense of
recognition which is one of the most innocent and egotistic of human diversions, that feeling of understanding and of mastering an observation.
He was as pleased as a side-street nobody when in his newspaper he sees the name of a man he knows.

"I'm enjoying this!" said Sam.



He had been accustomed to "sizing up" American towns; he could look from a Pullman window at Kalamazoo or Titus Center and guess the population
within ten per cent. He could, and with frequency he did; he was fascinated by figures of any sort, and for twenty years he had been trying to
persuade Fran that there was nothing essentially ignoble in remembering populations and areas and grade-percentages and the average life of
tires. He had been able to guess not too badly at the size of British towns; he had not been too greatly bewildered by anything in England, once
he was over the shock of seeing postmen with funny hats, and taxicabs with no apparent speed above neutral. But in Paris, as they bumped and slid
and darted from the Gare du Nord to their hotel, he could not be certain just what it was that he was seeing.

Fran was articulate enough about it. She half stood up in the taxi, crying, "Oh, look, Sam, look! Isn't it adorable! Isn't it too exciting! Oh,
the darling funny little ZINCS! And the Cointreau ads, instead of chewing gum! These bald-faced high white houses! Everybody so noisy, and yet so
gay! Oh, I ADORE it!"

But for Sam it was a motion picture produced by an insane asylum; it was an earthquake with a volcano erupting and a telephone bell ringing just
after he'd gone to sleep; it was lightning flashes and steam whistles and newspaper extras and war.

Their taxicab, just missing an omnibus, sliding behind its rear platform. A policeman, absurdly little, with an absurd white baton. Two priests
over glasses of beer at a cafe. Silver gray everywhere, instead of London's golden brown. Two exceedingly naked plaster ladies upholding a fifth-
story balcony. Piles of shoddy rugs in front of a shop, and beside them a Frenchman looking utterly content with his little business, instead of
yearning at the department store opposite and feeling guilty as he would in New York or Chicago or Zenith. Fish. Bread. Beards. Brandy.
Artichokes. Apples. Etchings. Fish. A stinking-looking alley. A splendid sweeping boulevard. Circular tin structures whose use he dared not
suspect and which gave him a shocking new notion of Latin proprieties and of the apparently respectable and certainly bearded gentlemen who
dashed toward them. Many books, bound in paper of a thin-looking yellow. An incessant, nerve-cracking, irritating, exhilarating blat-blat-blat of
nervous little motor horns. Buildings which in their blankness seemed somehow higher than American skyscrapers ten times as high. A tiny, frowsy,
endearing facade of a house which suggested the French Revolution and crazed women in red caps and kirtled skirts. A real artist (Sam decided), a
being in red beard, wide black hat, and a cloak, with a dog-eared marble-paper-covered portfolio under his arm. Gossiping women, laughing,
denouncing, forgiving, laughing. Superb public buildings, solid-looking as Gibraltar. Just missing another taxi, and the most admirable cursing
by both chauffeurs--

"This certainly is a busy town. But not much traffic control, looks to me," said Samuel Dodsworth, and his voice was particularly deep and
solemn, because he was particularly confused and timid.

It was at the Grand Hotel des Deux Hemispheres et Dijon that he was able to reassume the pleasant mastery with which (he hoped) he had been able
to impress Fran at the Calais customs. The assistant manager of the hotel spoke excellent English, and Sam had never been entirely at a loss so
long as his opponent would be decent and speak a recognizable language.

Lucile McKelvey, of Zenith, had told Fran that the Hemispheres was "such a nice, quiet hotel," and Sam had wired for reservations from London. By
himself, he would doubtless have registered and taken meekly whatever room was given him. But Fran insisted on seeing their suite, and they found
it a damp, streaked apartment looking on a sunless courtyard.

"Oh, this won't do at all!" wailed Fran. "Haven't you something decent?"

The assistant manager, a fluent Frenchman from Roumania via Algiers, looked them up and down with that contempt, that incomparable and enfeebling
contempt, which assistant managers reserve for foreigners on their first day in Paris.

"We are quite full up," he sniffed.

"You haven't anything else at all?" she protested.

"No, Madame."

Those were the words, but the tune was, "No, you foreign nuisance--jolly lucky you are to be admitted here at all--I wonder if you two really ARE
married--well, I'll overlook that, but I shan't stand any Yankee impertinence!"

Even the airy Fran was intimidated, and she said only, "Well, I don't like it--"

And then Samuel Dodsworth appeared again.

His knowledge of Parisian hotels and their assistant managers was limited, but his knowledge of impertinent employees was vast.

"Nope," he said. "No good. We don't like it. We'll look elsewhere."

"But Monsieur has engaged this suite!"

The internationalist and the provincial looked at each other furiously, and it was the assistant manager whose eyes fell, who looked embarrassed,
as Sam's paws curled, as the back of his neck prickled with unholy wrath.

"Look here! You know this is a rotten hole! Do you want to send for the manager--the boss, whatever you call him?"

The assistant manager shrugged, and left them, coldly and with speed.

Rather silently, Sam lumbered beside Fran down to their taxi. He supervised the reloading of their baggage, and atrociously overtipped every one
whom he could coax out of the hotel.

"Grand Universel!" he snapped at the taxi-driver, and the man seemed to understand his French.

In the taxi he grumbled, "I TOLD you I had to learn the French for 'Go to hell.'"

A silence; then he ruminated, "Glad we got out of there. But I bullied that poor rat of a clerk. Dirty trick! I'm sorry! I'm three times as big
as he is. Stealing candy from a kid! Dirty trick! I see why they get sore at Americans like me. Sorry, Fran."

"I adore you!" she said, and he looked mildly astonished.

At the Grand Universel, on the Rue de Rivoli, they found an agreeable suite overlooking the Tuileries, and twenty times an hour, as she unpacked,
Fran skipped to the window to gloat over Paris, the Casanova among cities.



Their sitting-room seemed to him very pert and feminine in its paneled walls covered with silky yellow brocade, its fragile chairs upholstered in
stripes of silver and lemon. Even the ponderous boule cabinet was frivolous, and the fireplace was of lively and rather indecorous pink marble.
He felt that it was a light-minded room, a room for sinning in evening clothes. All Paris was like that, he decided.

Then he stepped out on the fretted iron balcony and looked to the right, to the Place de la Concorde and the beginning of the Champs Elysees,
with the Chamber of Deputies across the Seine. He was suddenly stilled, and he perceived another Paris, stately, aloof, gray with history,
eternally quiet at heart for all its superficial clamor.

Beneath the quacking of motor horns he heard the sullen tumbrils. He heard the trumpets of the Napoleon who had saved Europe from petty princes.
He heard, without quite knowing that he heard them, the cannon of the Emperor who was a Revolutionist. He heard things that Samuel Dodsworth did
not know he had heard or ever could hear.

"Gee, Fran, this town has been here a long time, I guess," he meditated. "This town knows a lot," said Samuel Dodsworth of Zenith. "Yes, it knows
a lot."

And, a little sadly, "I wish I did!"



There are many Parises, with as little relation one to another as Lyons to Monte Carlo, as Back Bay to the Dakota wheatfields. There is the
trippers' Paris: a dozen hotels, a dozen bars and restaurants, more American than French; three smutty revues; three railroad stations; the Cafe
de la Paix; the Eiffel Tower; the Arc de Triomphe; the Louvre; shops for frocks, perfumes, snake-skin shoes, and silk pajamas; the regrettable
manners of Parisian taxi-drivers; and the Montmartre dance-halls where fat, pink-skulled American lingerie-buyers get drunk on imitation but
inordinately expensive champagne, to the end that they put on pointed paper hats, scatter confetti, conceive themselves as Great Lovers, and in
general forget their unfortunate lot.

The students' Paris, round about the Sorbonne, very spectacled and steady. The fake artists' Paris, very literary and drunk and full of theories.
The real artists' Paris, hidden and busy and silent. The cosmopolites' Paris, given to breakfast in the Bois, to tea at the Ritz, and to reading
the social columns announcing who has been seen dining with princesses at Ciro's--namely, a Paris whose chief joy is in being superior to the
trippers.

There is also reported to be a Paris inhabited by no one save three million Frenchmen.

It is said that in this unknown Paris live bookkeepers and electricians and undertakers and journalists and grandfathers and grocers and dogs and
other beings as unromantic as people Back Home.

Making up a vast part of all save this last of the Parises are the Americans.

Paris is one of the largest, and certainly it is the pleasantest, of modern American cities. It is a joyous town, and its chief joy is in its
jealousies. Every citizen is in rivalry with all the others in his knowledge of French, of museums, of wine, and of restaurants.

The various castes, each looking down its nose at the caste below, are after this order: Americans really domiciled in Paris for years, and
connected by marriage with the French noblesse. Americans long domiciled, but unconnected with the noblesse. Americans who have spent a year in
Paris--those who have spent three months--two weeks--three days--half a day--just arrived. The American who has spent three days is as derisive
toward the half-a-day tripper as the American resident with smart French relatives is toward the poor devil who has lived in Paris for years but
who is there merely for business.

And without exception they talk of the Rate of Exchange.

And they are all very alike, and mostly homesick.

They insist that they cannot live in America, but, except for a tenth of them who have really become acclimated in Europe, they are so hungry for
American news that they subscribe to the home paper, from Keokuk or New York or Pottsville, and their one great day each week is that of the
arrival of the American mail, on which they fall with shouts of "Hey, Mamie, listen to this! They're going to put a new heating plant in the
Lincoln School." They know quite as well as Sister Louisa, back home, when the Washington Avenue extension will be finished. They may
ostentatiously glance daily at Le Matin or Le Journal, but the Paris editions of the New York Herald and the Chicago Tribune they read solemnly,
every word, from the front page stories--"Congress to Investigate Election Expenses," and "Plans Transatlantic Aeroplane Liners" to the "News of
Americans in Europe," with its tidings that Mrs. Witney T. Auerenstein of Scranton entertained Geheimrat and Frau Bopp at dinner at the Bristol,
and that Miss Mary Minks Meeton, author and lecturer, has arrived at the Hotel Pedauque.

Each of these castes is subdivided according to one's preference for smart society or society so lofty that it need not be smart, society given
to low bars and earnest drinking, the society of business exploitation, or that most important society of plain loafing. Happy is he who can
cleave utterly to one of these cliques; he can find a group of fellow zealots and, drinking or shopping or being artistic, be surrounded with
gloriously log-rolling comrades.

But Sam Dodsworth was unfortunate, for his wife panted to combine smartness with an attention to Art, while he himself preferred business and the
low bars.

For all of Fran's superiority to "sight-seeing," they were at first lonely in Paris, and Sam was able to drag her to all the places mentioned in
the guide-books. They danced at Zelli's; they went up the Eiffel Tower and she came near to being sick in corners; thrice they went to the
Louvre; and once he cajoled her into the New York Bar for a whisky and soda and spirited conversation with an unknown man about skiing and the
Bronx. She showed even more zest than he in finding new small restaurants--he would have been content to return every night to the places in
which he had conquered the waiters and learned the wine-list.

And, curiously, he enjoyed galleries and picture-exhibitions more than she.

Fran had read enough about art; she glanced over the studio magazines monthly, and she knew every gallery on Fifth Avenue. But, to her, painting,
like all "culture," was interesting only as it adorned her socially. In story-books parroting the Mark Twain tradition, the American wife still
marches her husband to galleries from which he tries to sneak away; but in reality Sam's imagination was far more electrified by blue snow and
golden shoulders and dynamic triangles than was Fran's. Probably he would have balked at the blurs of Impressionism and the jazz mathematics of
Cubism, but it chanced that the favorite artist just this minute was one Robinoff, who did interiors pierced with hectic sunshine hurled between
the slats of Venetian blinds, or startling sun-rays striking into dusky woodlands, and at these (while Fran impatiently wanted to get on to tea)
Sam stared long and contentedly, drawing in his breath as though he smelled the hot sun.

In every phase Fran was as incalculable about "sight-seeing" as about liking his business associates. One day she was brazen enough to be
discovered with the tourists' badge, the red Baedeker, unconcealed; the next she wouldn't even sit with him at a sidewalk cafe--at the Napolitain
or the Closerie-des-Lilas.

"But why not?" he protested. "Best place to see the world go by. Everybody goes to 'em."

"Smart people don't."

"Well, I'm not smart!"

"Well, I am!"

"Then you ought to be smart enough to not care what anybody thinks!"

"Perhaps I am. . . . But I don't care to be seen sitting with a lot of trippers in raincoats."

"But you sat in a cafe yesterday, and enjoyed it. Don't you remember the beggar that sang--"

"Exactly! I've had enough of it! Oh, if you want to go and yearn over your dear American fellow tourists, by all means go, my dear Samuel! I am
going to the Crillon and have a decent tea."

"And yearn over the dear fellow American tourists that happen to be rich!"

"Is it necessary for you always to quarrel with me because I want to do what I want to do? I'm not keeping you from sitting on your sidewalks.
Don't go to the Crillon! Go to one of your beloved American bars, if you want to, and scrape up acquaintance with a lot of drunken business men--
"

They compromised on going to the Crillon.

He puzzled over her feeling that it was a duty to keep herself fashionable in the eyes of the choice people who did not know that she existed. He
could understand that back in Zenith she might have a good human satisfaction in being more snobbish than the matron across the street, in the
ancient sport of "putting it over on the neighbors." He had been unrighteously pleased when he had seen her better dressed than her dear friend
and resented rival, Lucile McKelvey. "Good girl," he had crowed; "you were the best-dressed wench in the room!"

But why should it matter to Fran that a strange Parisian aristocrat passing in a carriage might some day see them sitting contentedly at a cafe
and arch her brows at them?

He admitted that the serene and classic Place des Vosges with the Carnavalet Museum was perhaps more select than Pat's Chicago Bar; that caneton
presse might be a more elegant food than corn fritters at the Savannah Grill. "But," he fretted, "why can't you enjoy both--as long as you DO
enjoy 'em? Nobody's hired us to come here and be stylish! We haven't got any duty involved! Back home there may have been a law against enjoying
ourselves the way we wanted to, but there's none here!"

"My dear Sam, it's a matter of keeping one's self-respect. It's like the Englishman, all alone in the jungle, who always dresses for dinner."

"Yes, I've read about him! In the first place, he probably didn't do it, and in the second place, if he did he was a chump! That's how I've
always figured it."

"You would! You couldn't understand what it meant to him--"

"Well, if all that stood between him and losing his self-respect was a hard-boiled shirt-front, I guess he might as well have let it slide! If I
can't be self-respectful in a flannel shirt, I'm about ready to jump off the dock and--"

"Oh, you simply can't UNDERSTAND!"



They had never had much time in Zenith for a serious attention to quarreling and being domestically vulgar. All day he had been at the office;
most evenings they had seen other people; on Sunday there had been golf and relatives. They had time a-plenty now, equally for quarreling and for
intimate and adventurous happiness together. One day they wrangled--and endlessly, because they were not quarreling over any one thing in
particular but over the differences in their philosophies of life; the next they went off (and sometimes she was simple and gay enough to let him
carry sandwiches somewhat mussily in his pocket) to explore the Forest of Fontainebleau, and they laughed as they walked through groves shivering
with April.

He was becoming acquainted with her and, sometimes, slightly, with himself.



He saw little enough of Frenchmen outside of hotel-servants, waiters, shopmen, but what he did see of them, what he saw of the surface of French
life, puzzled him. Many travelers in like case take out their confusion in resentment, and damn the whole nation as trivial and mad. But there
was in Sam a stubborn wish to get in behind any situation that he came across. He was not one to amuse himself by novelties, by making scenes, by
collecting curious people, even overmuch by travel, but once he was dragged into something new he wanted to understand it, and he had a touch of
humility, a deep and sturdy recognition of his own ignorance, whenever he could not understand.

And he could not understand these Frenchmen.

He watched them in cafes, at the theater, in shops, in trains to Tours and Versailles. How was it that they could sit, not restless, playing
dominoes or chattering, over nothing more beguiling than glasses of coffee (and why was it that they drank coffee in glasses, anyway, instead of
in cups)?

They liked talking so much. What the deuce did they find to talk about, hour on hour? How could they stand it without something to DO?

Why were there so few grassy yards about the houses? How was it that the most respectable old couples, silvery old men and crouched little old
women, were willing to be seen at ordinary cafes in the evening, when their counterparts back home considered the saloon, the cafe, as the final
haunt of the abominable? He saw the French people being gracious in shops, beaming on the babies in the Luxembourg Gardens, laughing together as
they paraded the streets, and he decided that they were the soul of kindliness. He saw a Frenchman scowl at American barbarians for daring to
enter his quarter-filled railway compartment, he heard Fran being atrociously denounced by a recently smiling, buxom, clean, wholesome shop-woman
when Fran insisted that she had been overcharged ten centimes for dry-cleaning a pair of gloves, and he decided that the French were rude and
mean to a point of hatefulness . . . and that his Fran showed an enjoyment of squabbling which was a little disturbing to him.

He saw the Louvre, the silks in shops on the Place Vendome, the trimness of their own apartment at the Grand Universel, and he decided that the
French had the best taste in the world. He saw the department stores with their atrocious brass-fretted windows, their displays of fish and fowl
and Marquise-in-a-garden chromos, of buffets carved with wooden blobs, of chairs that were even more violently high-colored than they were
uncomfortable; he saw, in the haughty Parc Monceau, the imported ruins; he saw intelligent-seeming Frenchmen snickering over smutty post-cards
and the eternal, unchanging pictures of naked young women in Vie Parisienne and Le Rire; and he decided that the French had no taste whatever.

But behind all his decisions was the decision that Sam Dodsworth would never be anything save bewildered by foreign ways, while Fran might,
perhaps, take to them so eagerly that their companionship would be smashed forever.



CHAPTER 13


Sam was used enough to New York hotels, and he had spent occasional fortnights at summer inns of Northern Michigan, Maine, the Berkshires. But he
had never known the existence of the prosperous refugees from life who cling for years to hotels and pensions, who are mothered by chambermaids,
fathered by concierges, befriended only by room-waiters--if they find any waiters kind enough and idle enough to be patient with their longing to
gossip.

And he did not like it.

He felt as though he were living in an Old People's Home. The attention of the servants made him feel old; the elevator man infuriated him by
placing a hand under his arm to help him out of an elevator which had stopped a whole inch above the floor; the page boy in the lobby infuriated
him by spinning the revolving door--and usually spinning it so artfully that one blade just missed Sam's nose; the head waiter infuriated him by
inquiring, as though Sam had never heard of menus, "A little soup this evening, Mr. Samuels?" and most of all he was infuriated by the room-
waiters who were each morning astonished that he should desire eggs in addition to his Continental Breakfast, who fussed over knives and forks,
who pushed up chairs and snatched away the pleasant litter of newspapers, and who held out his napkin as though he were too feeble to lift it for
himself.

Yet he was dependent on them. Though Fran was making much now of reading the Matin daily and of knowing all about art exhibitions and the hours
when theaters began, she had to turn to the tall and patronizing concierge for information about what train to take to Versailles--where to buy
slippers--who was the best American dentist--how much one ought to pay for a lacquered Japanese cigarette case--why the deuce Mathilde et Cie.
hadn't delivered the evening scarf they'd promised for this afternoon--and just what WAS the general reputation of Mathilde et Cie. for
delivering things and for overcharging?

He sank heavily into accepting the hotel as his natural dwelling, as a prisoner sinks into accepting a jail. Presently he was not bothered by the
devious way from the elevator to their suite--to the right, sharp turning right again, turning left by that dusty old trunk with the red and
green stripes which had apparently stood there in the corridor forever, then seventh door on the left--the door with the long scratch under the
knob. He came to accept it as any other peasant accepts the long way to his hut, dark and meaningless and weary to tired legs. He was no longer
annoyed by the too open-work and too generally brassy and light-minded appearance of the French elevator; he learned that the elevator was the
"lift" or the "ascenseur" or indeed almost anything except the "elevator"; he learned that the room service-bell never worked and that the best
way to get a waiter was to stand in the door and bellow "Gar-song"; and he learned that the Mr. Samuel Dodsworth who once had been received with
a certain deference in the General Offices of the Revelation Motor Company in Zenith was fortunate here when the Greek boots nodded to him in the
hall.

He even got used to living in a lack of privacy like that of a monkey in a Zoo. After a time he could without self-consciousness sit and read the
Paris editions of the American papers in the old-fashioned lounge of the hotel--he went there daily, despite having a drawing-room of his own, in
a sneaking, never-admitted hope that some day he would be recognized and picked up by a fellow American exile. The lounge was modern in its small
and hideous tables covered with pebbled beaten brass, its fountain, with Neptune undistinguishable from any other marble tombstone, and the
number of cocktails gulped daily at five o'clock by young ladies who spoke Chicagoese with a very fair imitation of a French accent. But the
modernity of the lounge had not run to new chairs; they were of red and golden plush, made delicate and chaste with antimacassars, and looking
rather as though they had been dedicated by Napoleon III.

It had not been easy for Sam to get used to reading in the lounge, to dressing his mind in public. He was accustomed to the communism of clubs,
but there, no one paid attention to any one else. In the lounge, no one had very much to do except to pay attention. They stared, and always
resentfully. The English mother and daughter who were the most exclusive and the most resentful toward strangers were precisely the people who
spent the most time in the lounge being exclusive and resentful. The French provincial magnate who had arrived just that morning was precisely
the person who looked with the greatest irritation at a veteran like Sam, now settled here two whole weeks, when Sam annoyed him by taking the
next chair and moving it two inches. And there were always elderly, slightly belching, very hairy couples who spent all their time catching his
eye and then looking indignant because he had caught their eyes.

But after a fortnight he could enter the lounge, ignore the human furniture, and rustle his newspaper with almost as much relaxation as he had
felt in his library in Zenith.

He was becoming accustomed to the home of the homeless.



He discovered slowly, and always with a little astonishment, that the French were human, even according to the standard of the United States of
America.

He found that in certain French bathrooms one can have hot water without waiting for a geyser. He found that he needn't have brought two dozen
tubes of his favorite (and very smelly) toothpaste from America--one actually could buy toothpaste, corn-plasters, New York Sunday papers, Bromo-
Seltzer, Lucky Strikes, safety-razor blades, and ice cream almost as easily in Paris as in the United States; and a man he met at Luigi's Bar
insisted that if one quested earnestly enough, he could find B.V.D.'s.

And he discovered that French chauffeurs drove better than Americans.



He meditated on it, alone with a cognac and soda (he had learned to say "Une fine a l'eau de seltz," and often the waiters understood him) in
front of Weber's, during a not ungrateful hour of freedom when Fran was trying on hats.

"Just what did I expect in France? Oh, I don't know. Funny! Kind of hard to remember now just how I did picture it. Guess I thought there
wouldn't be any comforts--no bathrooms, and everybody taking red wine and snails for breakfast, and no motor 'busses or comfortable trains, and
no cocktails, and all the men wearing waxed mustaches and funny beards. And saying, 'Ze hired girl iz vun lofely girl--oo la la--'

"And then these young Frenchmen, in London clothes, driving Hispano-Suizas at a hundred kilometers an hour--And you hear 'em at the Ritz, talking
perfect English, talking about English stainless steel and about building bridges in the Argentine and the influence of the Soviets in China and-
-

"I suppose I felt that the entire known world revolved around the General Offices of the Revelation Motor Company, Constitution Avenue, Zenith,
and all the time--Towers and cathedrals and alleys, and Europe not caring what Sam Dodsworth thought about making the 1928 models a Delft blue--

"It seemed so important!

"But, mind you, I am glad I'm an American! But--

"Life was a lot simpler then. We knew we were It! We knew that all of Europe was unbathed and broke, and that America was the world's only
bulwark against Bolshevism and famine. They lie so! These speakers at club meetings, and these writers in the magazines! They tell us that no
European has ever played tennis or taught the Ten Commandments to his kids or built a railroad, and that the only thing that keeps Europe from
reverting to the caveman is American cash.

"Rot!

"And yet, I'm never going to be European! Fran might--Oh, Fran, my darling, are you going to drift away from me? Every day you get snootier about
my poor old provincial Americanism! You're just waiting for some really slick European to come along--And, by God, there's one thing I won't
stand--her telling me how inferior I am to some gigolo--

"Fool! Of course the girl--Say! That's what she still is; she's still a girl! Little older than Emily, but not so sensible. Of course she gets
excited by Europe. She's done her job, hasn't she? She's run the house and brought Emily and Brent up, hasn't she? I've got to be patient.

"But falling for a feather-weight like Lockert--

"Hell! I wish Tub were here. Fran and I haven't got anybody--

"And you're still dodging the issue, my lad!

"What is Sam Dodsworth going to do about the fact that he's as provincial as a prairie-dog, and that he's only fifty-one, with a chance of
another thirty years, and that he's discovered a world--

"Nothing, I guess! Too late. I'd be a pretty spectacle, now wouldn't I, as one of these American business-men that come over here and try to hide
the fact that they made their coin out of soap or pork--And so they collect first editions and apologize for being themselves! But just now and
then I'll learn to sit still like this, and not feel I have to be efficient and hustle--

"My God! Five o'clock! I've got to hustle and meet Fran!"



But he had one comfort, given to him by his wife. He had been uncomfortably impressed by the fact that Mathieu, his customary room-waiter at the
Grand Universel, a fat, curly-haired, and unctuous person with fascinatingly different spots on his dress-suit lapels every day, spoke English so
perfectly.

According to the good American custom, Sam had said to him at his very first breakfast, "Where'd you learn your English?"

Mathieu chuckled, "I wass fife years in Tchicago."

Mathieu was rather more colloquially American than Sam in his suggestions for breakfast, or for lunch when it was too rainy for them to go out,
or when there was a glorious American mail. "How about a nice little minute steak?" he would say, in the very accent of Chicago; or "Say, boss,
there's some nice caviare just come in from Rooshia."

Whence it happened that Sam believed Mathieu spoke the American language.

But on the third day, at breakfast, Fran said, "Mathieu! Do you happen to know where these movie theaters are on the Left Bank that are putting
on modernistic films?"

Mathieu stared.

"Pardon, Madame!" he said.

"Theaters--modern films--cinemas--oh, whatever you call 'em--!"

Fran slipped across the room to the bottle-green-and-golden dictionary on the flimsy desk.

"Le--cinematograph moderne--est-ce qu'il y a--I mean, are there any on the Left Bank?"

Mathieu looked at her with a most superior intelligence:

"Oh yez. You ask the concierge. He tell you! De veal steak iss fine today--just like Tchicago!"

When Mathieu had gone out to fetch the veal steak that was so fine today, Fran murmured, "I have made a great discovery! Aside from food-
vocabulary, the Mathieus speak English no better than we do French! We're not so bad, my beloved!"

"You're not, of course. But I'm terrible!"

"Don't be silly! Yesterday you said 'A quelle heure est le Louvre ferme?'--as a matter of fact, I think you did say 'est le Louvre closed?' but
the taxi-driver understood it perfectly, and I know you'd learn to speak a really splendid French, if you gave your mind to it."

"Honestly?" said Sam.



CHAPTER 14


They had ventured to the Left Bank for an evening at the Cafe Novgorod, the favorite of the more arty Americans. The cafe seemed to Sam less
related to Paris than he was himself. . . . The French street: bourgeois fathers strolling with their brood; dark-eyed men jesting with girls in
red kerchiefs; an old woman crawling along muttering to herself. But here, in the Cafe Novgorod, under the awning, a bumble of American voices:

"--get a little Citroen and tour Normandy--"

"--a complete meal for six francs, with lovely roast beef, though prob'ly it's horse-meat--"

"--that Elliot Paul is the only really distinguished essayist in--"

The young Americans there were so disposive. Sam heard them, at the tables about, dispose of Californian scenery, the institution of marriage,
Whistler, corn fritters, President Wilson, cement roads, and the use of catsup. He became gloomier than at the thickest dinner-party in London,
and he was thinking of bed when his gloom was interrupted by a voice like that of a female impersonator.

Lycurgus Watts (only he liked to be called "Jerry") was standing by their table and beaming in fondest affection.

Lycurgus (or Jerry) Watts was the professional amateur of Zenith. He was a large-faced man, as wide as a truck-driver, but he had a whiney,
caressing voice, and he giggled at his own jokes, which were incessant and very bad. He was reputed to be fifty years old, and he looked anywhere
from twenty-five to a hundred. He came from what was known as a "good family"--anyway, it was a wealthy family. His father had died when he was
ten. He had lived and traveled with his widowed mother till he was forty-three, and he told every one that she was the noblest character he had
ever known. Compared with her, all young women were such hussies that he would never marry. But he made up for it by a number of highly
confidential friendships with men whose voices and matriolatry were like his own.

He wandered much, in Europe and Asia, but always he came back to the flat he kept in Zenith. It was so filled with his collections of lace,
wrought-iron keys, and editions of Oscar Wilde, that there was scarcely room for his genuine Russian samovar and his bed with a cover of black
and gold. He spent much of his time in Zenith in denouncing the tradesmen who manufactured soap and motor cars instead of collecting lace, and in
checking up his profitable holdings in soap and motor cars. He got up the first exhibition of Slavic embroidery in the state, he read poetry
aloud, and he talked a good deal about starting a new magazine of the new poetry and the new prose.

Whenever Sam had met Jerry Watts in Zenith, he had grumbled to Fran on the way home, "Why the devil did they invite that white grub? He makes me
sick!" But as Jerry had invariably told Fran in three languages that she was the loveliest lady in town, she turned on Sam with "Oh, of course!
Just because Jerry is really cultured, because he has brains enough to cultivate a fine leisure instead of grubbing in a dirty office, all you
noble captains of industry look down on him as a dray-horse might look down on a fine race-horse!"

She even had Jerry for dinner. In fact, Sam had been led to hate Jerry with considerable heartiness.

But in the oppressive strangeness of Paris, any familiar face would have been exciting, and for five minutes Sam believed that he was glad to see
Jerry Watts.

Jerry sat down; he giggled, "I TOLD you you'd escape from that dreadful Middlewest, Fran, and come to a civilized country! Don't you just ADORE
the Novgorod? Such darling roughnecks! Such delectable poses! Oh, my DEARS, I heard the best one here last evening! Tommy Troizka--he's the
dearest Finn boy, and a great water-colorist, speaks English perfectly, oh, too simply divinely, and Tommy said, 'The trouble with your American
intelligentsia is that most of you don't know how to TELL A GENT when you see him!' Isn't that precious! Oh, you'll adore being here in Paris!
Don't you, Dodsworth?"

"Yeah, great town," said Sam.

"Have you been to the Lion d'Or yet?"

"Oh yes," said Fran.

"Have you tried the rognons de la maison at Emil's?"

"Yes."

"And of course you've been to the L'Ane Rouge and the Rendezvous des Mariniers?"

"Yes."

"And the Chemise Sale?"

"No, I don't think--"

"You haven't been to the Chemise Sale? Oh, Fran! Why, good Heavens! Don't you realize that the Chemise Sale is the duckiest little restaurant in
Paris?"

Fran was annoyed.

It was not that she was given to ducky little restaurants or any other phase of synthetic Bohemianism, but that any other citizen of Zenith
should know more about Paris than she was intolerable. She glared slightly when Jerry seized his advantage and laid down the rule that it was
vulgar to go to Versailles but that they MUST see the exhibition of the Prismatic Internists. Sam felt patiently that she would presently
despatch Jerry. Yet she looked pleased when Jerry piped:

"Have you met Endicott Everett Atkins? He's coming to tea at my place next Saturday afternoon--I have such a dusky little studio on the Rue des
Petits-Champs. You and your husband must come."

"We'll be glad to," said Fran, to Sam's considerable discouragement.



Sam grunted, in the taxicab, "What do you want to go there for? Who's Endicott Everett Atkins? Sounds like a business college yell. He another
lily like Watts?"

"No, he really is somebody. Dean of the American literary colony here--writes about French novelists and Austrian peasant furniture and Correggio
and English hunting and Heaven knows what all."

"But I don't have to learn about peasant furniture, too, do I?" Sam said hopefully.



Mr. Endicott Everett Atkins was reputed to resemble Henry James. He had the massive and rather bald head, the portly dignity. He spoke--and he
spoke a good deal--in a measured voice, and he had a small bright wife who was believed to adore him. He also was blessed, and furthered in his
critical pursuits, by having no sense of humor whatever, though he knew so many sparkling anecdotes that one did not suspect it for hours. He
came from South Biddlesford, Connecticut, and his father, to whom he often referred as "that dear and so classical a bibliophile," had been an
excellent hat-manufacturer. He owned a real house in Paris, with an upstairs and down, and he spoke chummily of the Ambassador.

He did actually, against any expectation, keep his promise and appear at the tea in Mr. Jerry Watts's studio--an apartment with a scarlet-fever
of Spanish altar-cloths, embroidered copes, and Mandarin robes. The only apparent reason for calling it a studio was that it had a north window,
and that Mr. Jerry Watts naturally would call it a studio. "I just can't make love except by a north light!" he nickered to Fran.

On the refectory table was a small teapot, a small plate of limp cakes, and an enormous bowl of punch. After every one had had three glasses of
the punch, the conversation became very agitated. There were massed about the table, screaming, some thirty people. Sam never remembered any of
them, save Endicott Everett Atkins. The rest seemed to him as indistinguishable as separate mosquitoes in a swarm, and rather noisier. But there
was nothing noisy about Mr. Endicott Everett Atkins. He had so developed poise, an appalling, reproving, Christian Science sort of poise, that
Sam felt toward him as he once had toward the professor of Greek drama at Yale.

Mr. Atkins could purr at the thought of particularly pleasant and beautiful things--a Greek coin, a Javanese dancing girl, a check from his
publisher--but in crowds he stood calm and expansive as an observation balloon in windless air. In the quietest corner of the apartment he held
forth on the Italian Renaissance, the superiority of Parliament to Congress, the future of Anglo-Catholicism, the letters of Horace Walpole, and
the perfection of anarchism as a theory--he had actually attended an anarchist meeting in Milan in 1890, as an ardent young traveler. You never
remembered what he had said, but you felt that he had been tremendously sound, and you sighed, uneasily running your forefinger between collar
and neck, "He has such a fund of knowledge--"

Mr. Atkins pounced on Fran, and if he did not also exactly pounce on Sam, he tolerated him. He took in Fran's shining hair, her freshness, her
slim quickness. He brought her a cup of punch, bowing like Louis XIV. He won Sam by telling him of meeting Dr. Carl Benz, the father of the motor
car, at Mannheim, back in 1885, and of seeing his first horseless carriage--it was, said Atkins, a wire-wheeled tricycle with a chain drive like
a bicycle, a handle for steering, and under the seat a mass of machinery as wild-looking as a gutted alarm clock.

"Like to've seen it!" murmured Sam. "Happen to know what the horse-power was?"

Mr. Endicott Everett Atkins looked at him benevolently, his glossy baldness rose-hued in the red-shaded lamps. "It was three and a quarter," he
said.

(It was not for sixty hours that, lying awake in the early morning, Sam realized that Atkins hadn't had the smallest notion what the horse-power
of the Benz really was.)



With men, Mr. Endicott Everett Atkins rarely let down, but with slim and glistening women he came near to being human. He indicated to Fran that
this was only a merry slumming prank of his to come to the studio of Mr. Lycurgus Watts--normally he moved only in the loftiest circles, among
the loveliest ladies, the wittiest and bravest men, the rarest first editions, and he longed to introduce her to all of them.

She loved it.

He told her the delightful anecdote which he had heard from Andre Sorchon, who had it from E. V. Lucas, who had it from Henry James, who had it
direct from Swinburne. He told her that her husband (Mr. Samuel Dodsworth) was extraordinarily like the late Duc de Malmaison, but that she was
ever and ever so much nicer than the Duchesse. He told her that her ash-blond hair was astonishingly like that of Madame Zelie du Strom, the
Swedish tragedienne who, Mr. Atkins agreed with himself, was greater than Bernhardt, Duse, and Modjeska put together--

Sam sat back, as so often he had sat back at directors' meetings, content to let others do the talking if he could do the plotting, and tried to
make out the purposes of Mr. Endicott Everett Atkins.

"This fellow knows a lot. Well, at least he's read a lot. Well, if he hasn't read so much, he remembers all he has read. Here he's making love to
Fran--telling her what a wonder she is--and she's lapping it up. Bless her! Let her have her fling--if the fling ain't any more dangerous than
old Atkins! Wonder if I'll be as dry a bladder as he is in fifteen years? If I am, I'm going to retire to a log cabin and grow corn!"



"I really can't tell you," Mr. Endicott Everett Atkins was moaning at Fran, "how very, very much I admire your wisdom in coming to Europe in a
really leisured pilgrimage. And I wonder if you realize you're doing a patriotic American duty--showing Europe that we have poised and exquisite
creatures like yourself, if you'll permit the familiarity from an aged bookworm, as well as these Yankee tourist women--oh, these dreadful
bouncing females, with their shrill voices, their ignorance of all gentle usages--and the way they frequent horrible American bars and dance in
dreadful places--"



"Why shouldn't the 'Yankee tourist women' go and dance in Montmartre, if they enjoy it?" Sam meditated. "Does Atkins think the pretty buyer from
Detroit comes here to please him? The American highbrow abroad is just like the Puritan back home--the Puritan says that if you drink anything at
all, he'll disapprove of you, and the expatriate here says that if you drink anything but Chateau Haut Something-or-other at just the right
temperature, HE'LL disapprove of you and--

"I will get back for my class reunion this June! Thirtieth reunion! Am I that old?

"Think of seeing Tub again and Poodle Smith and Bill Dyers and--Now what the devil was the name of that big fellow with the red hair that played
center? Florey--Floreau--Flaherty? Corking fellow!

"And Atkins goes on. I'd better listen and get what wisdom I can, because I think our 'really leisured pilgrimage to Europe' is drawing to a
close!"



"--though I'm afraid, Mrs. Dodsworth, that you'll find our house too dreadfully bookish. Beautiful people like you are superior to books. You
ought never to read anything--you ought only to live. You ought to exist imperishably on some Grecian isle amid the wine-dark sea, dancing in the
sunshine. But if your husband and you will delight us by coming to lunch next Sunday, at least I may be able to show you one or two intaglios--"



At lunch at the Atkinses', on Sunday, Sam met his first Princess, Madame Maravigliarsi. Not that he knew at first that she was a Princess; in
fact he supposed her to be a nice, rather shabby little Poor Relation. But Atkins revealed her princessity in a dramatic aside, and Sam was as
impressed as any other proper democratic American.

And she was, Fran carefully ascertained, quite a good, high-ranking Princess, and only one-quarter American.

Sam sat next to her, at lunch in the tall cool room with its Venetian glass and the serene bust of Plato; and while he made a respectable show of
not being humble, the boy who had read "Ivanhoe" and Shakespeare and "The Idylls of the King" was gloating, "I'm sitting next to a Princess!"

The Princess prattled of what she had said to Mussolini and what His Eminence the Secretary to the Pope had said to her, and for ten minutes Sam
desired to know the renowned of the world. He remembered--what was it?--something that Fran had said to the effect that with his tall dignity and
his experience as executive, he might become an ambassador, and be intimate with ever so many people who had said things to Mussolini and had
Eminences say things to them--

But he wearied of Princess Maravigliarsi's chatter. It was SO important that he see Trouville and Biarritz; it was SO important that he properly
hate the Bolsheviks; SO important that he go to tea at Lady Ingraham's.

He dreaded these new obligations.

"So far as I can see," he brooded, "travel consists in perpetually finding new things that you have to do if you're going to be respectable."



Fran was polite to the Princess Maravigliarsi with a cold politeness which indicated to Sam that she was impressed. But it was to a certain
Madame de Penable that she gave most of her attention. Madame de Penable was a red-headed, white-skinned, rather plump woman who seemed to
specialize on knowing everybody of influence in every land. The Dodsworths never learned whether she was born in Poland, Nebraska, Africa, the
Dordogne, or Hungary. They never learned just who Monsieur de Penable was, if there ever had been a Monsieur de Penable. They never learned
whether she was in trade, living on alimony, or possessed of a family income. Sam suspected that she was an international spy. She was a pleasant
woman, and very clever. She talked about herself constantly, and never told anything whatever about herself. She spoke English, French, German,
and Italian perfectly, and at restaurants, with waiters as mysterious as herself, she went off into tongues which might have been Russian,
Lancashire, or Modern Greek.

Apparently she fancied the Dodsworths as additions to her circle. Sam heard her inviting Fran and himself to lunch at the Ermitage.

"Fran is launched," he sighed. "At last we'll be gay and cosmopolitan! I wonder how much I'll be able to win from Tub at poker, now that I've had
my style of playing perfected by European culture?"



CHAPTER 15


They ceased to be children exploring together, rather happy in their loneliness. They were dominated by Endicott Everett Atkins and Madame de
Penable and their smart groups. Madame de Penable saw that because in her fresh, keen, naive way Fran was different from European women, she was
the more novel and attractive to the innumerable European men whom the De Penable always had about her, running her errands, drinking her
excellent Moselle, listening to her scandalous anecdotes; she saw also that Sam was likely to keep Fran from snatching such of these men as the
De Penable wanted to hold for her own.

She cultivated the Dodsworths enthusiastically.

Fran's life became hectic as life can be only in Paris: a ride in the Bois, lunch, shopping, tea, bridge, cocktails, dressing, dinner, the
theater, dancing at such icily glittering haunts as the Jardin de Ma Soeur, cold cream and exhausted sleep. In between she managed to fit three
hours a week of French lessons.

And Sam--he came along.

He enjoyed it, for a month. There was color to this life, and motion, like waves under the gray cliff that was Paris. There were pretty women who
took him seriously, as one of the financial captains of America (he suspected, with an inward chuckle, that they thought him far richer than he
was). There were gorgeous clothes and marvelous food. He learned something of the art of wine. He had long known that Rhine wines should be cold;
that Burgundy is better than that womanish drink, champagne. But now, meeting people who took wine as seriously as he had motor engines, and
listening to their reverent discussion of it, he learned the epochal differences between the several Burgundies--between Nuits St. Georges and
Nuits-Premeaux; the cataclysmic differences between vintages--between the lordly crop of 1911 and the mediocre product of 1912. He learned that
it was a crime to dull the palate with a cocktail before a sacred bottle of good wine, and that it was bloody treason to heat Burgundy suddenly
by plunging it in the hot water, instead of decently decanting it hours before drinking and letting--it--come--SLOWLY (the connoisseurs
breathed)--to--room--temperature.

It interested him, this cyclone of new excitements. And Fran was, for the first time in years, altogether satisfied.

Between them, Atkins and the De Penable knew a dozen sets. Atkins fished for portrait painters, French critics, American ladies from the choicer
portions of Back Bay and Rittenhouse Square, English poets who pretended to be biologists and English biologists who were flattered at being
taken for poets. Madame de Penable went in for assorted titles--a judicious mixture of Italians, French, Roumanian, Georgian, Hungarian--and she
always had one sound, carefully selected freak: a delightfully droll pickpocket or a minor Arctic explorer.

The man out of all this boiling whom Fran most liked was an Italian aviator, Captain Gioserro, a bright-eyed, very smiling man, ten years younger
than herself. He was dazzled by her; bewildered by her quick speech. He said that she was the Norse goddess, Freya, that she was an Easter lily,
and a number of other highly elegant things, and she liked it and went riding with him.

Sam hoped that there was not going to be another Lockert explosion. He believed her when she insisted that she considered Gioserro a "mere boy."
But alone, brooding, he was worried. He wondered if her rigid distaste for flirtation had existed only because she had not found American men
attractive. She seemed softer, more relaxed, more lovely, and considerably less dependent on him. She was surrounded by amusing men, and warmed
by their extravagant compliments. His conscious self declared that she couldn't possibly be tempted, but his sub-conscious self was alarmed.

And presently he became weary of their insane dashing. The voices--the voices that never ceased--the high thin laughter--the reference to Mike
This and Jacques That and the amours of Lady the Other--the duty of being seen at every exhibition, every select tea, every concert--

Fran had sharply dropped for him the people they knew, all the low adventurers who sat about bars, the couples from Zenith whom they had met at
the hotel, even the unfortunate Jerry Lycurgus Watts, once Jerry had served his biological purpose by producing Endicott Everett Atkins. And so
Sam became exceedingly hungry for a good wholesome lowness; for poker, shirt-sleeves, sauerkraut, obscene vaudeville, and conversation about
motor sales and Zenith politics.



Fran was having her portrait painted, glossily and very expensively, by a Belgian whose manner of serving tea and commenting on new frocks had
enabled him to capture a number of rich American women. With him, painting was a social function; while he worked he was surrounded by the most
decorative human parrots and peacocks, shrieking their admiration of his craftsmanship, which was excellent. He managed to add the muzziness of a
Laurencin to the photography of a Sargent; he made his women look rich, and all alike.

Madame de Penable had insisted on Fran's going to this good man, and when Sam learned that the De Penable had also insisted on a number of other
women benefiting by the Belgian's gifts, he wondered if possibly the lively De Penable might not have some interest in the business. But Fran was
magnificently offended when he made the hint.

"It may interest you to KNOW," she raged, "that M. Saurier wanted to paint me for NOTHING, because he said I was the most perfect type of
American beauty he had ever seen! But of course I couldn't let him do that. Of course you wouldn't have noticed that certain Europeans think I'm
rather good-looking--"

"Don't," said Sam mildly, "be a damn' fool, my darling."

He went once to the orgy of her sittings; and he, the rock of ages in business crises, wanted to scream as he heard Madame de Penable, and six
women, who spoke all languages, except French, with a French accent, lilting that "le Maitre" was at least a genius, and that he was particularly
historic in the matter of "flesh tints."

He did not go again.



He came to like the affabilities of Endicott Everett Atkins even less than the expensive sunset-hues of Madame de Penable. The De Penable was
surrounded by gay people. "Not so bad," Sam considered, "to have a cocktail with a pretty girl that tells you that you look like a cross between
Sir Lancelot and Jack Dempsey." But Mr. Atkins had not yet heard of cocktails. And Mr. Atkins held forth. He had been everywhere, and he could
make everywhere sound uninteresting. He would look at you earnestly and demand to know whether you had made a pilgrimage to Viterbo to see the
Etruscan remains, and he made it sound so nagging a duty that Sam vowed he would never let himself be caught near Viterbo; he was so severe about
American music that he made Sam long for the jazz which he had always rather irritably detested.

Toward the seven deadly arts Sam had had the inarticulate reverence which an Irish policeman might have toward a shrine of the Virgin on his beat
. . . that little light seen at three of a winter's morning. They were to him romance, escape, and he was irritated when they were presented to
him as a preacher presents the virtues of sobriety and chastity. He hadn't the training to lose himself in Bach or Goethe; but in Chesterton, in
Schubert, in a Corot, he had been able to forget motors and Alec Kynance, and always he had chuckled over the gay anarchy of Mencken. But with
rising stubbornness he asserted that if he had to take the arts as something in which he must pass an examination, he would chuck them altogether
and be content with poker.



As Fran had both a sitting and a fitting that afternoon (to Sam they seemed much the same, except that Fran's costumer was more virile and less
grasping than her portrait-painter) he had a whole afternoon off.

Secretly, a little guiltily, he reflected, "I've done Notre Dame right, with Fran. Now I think I'll sneak off and see if I really like it! You
can't tell! I might! Even though old Atkins says I have to. . . . Hell! I wish I were back in Zenith!"

Solemnly, his Baedeker shamelessly in hand, Sam lumbered out of his taxi before Notre Dame, and quite as shamelessly slipped off across the river
to a cafe facing the cathedral. There, quietly, without Fran's quivers of appreciation, he began to feel at home.

He admitted the cathedral's gray domination. There was strength there; strength and endurance and wisdom. The flying buttresses soared like
wings. The whole cathedral expanded before his eyes; the work of human hands seemed to tower larger than the sky. He felt, dimly and
disconnectedly, that he too had done things with his hands; that the motor car was no contemptible creation; that he was nearer to the forgotten,
the anonymous and merry and vulgar artisans who had created this somber epic of stone, than was any Endicott Everett Atkins with his Adam's apple
ecclesiastically throbbing as he uttered pomposities about "the transition in Gothic motifs." How those cheery artisans would have laughed--
drinking their wine, perhaps, at this same corner!

He read in the Book of Words. (Did Ruskin and Cellini and Dante actually travel without Baedekers? How strange it seemed, and new!)

"Notre Dame . . . in early Roman times the site was occupied by a temple of Jupiter. The present church was begun in 1163."

He laid the book down and drifted into the pleasantest dreaming he had known for all the fatal weeks since he had been adopted by the Right
People.

A temple of Jupiter. Priests in white robes. Sacrificial bulls with patient wondering eyes, tossing their thick garlanded heads. Chariots
pounding across the square--right across the river there! The past, which had been to the young Sam Dodsworth playing football, to the man
harassed by building motor cars, only a flamboyant myth, was suddenly authentic, and he walked with Julius Caesar, who in that moment ceased to
be merely a drawing in a school-book, a ventriloquist's dummy talking the kind of overgrammatical rot that only school-masters could understand,
and became a living, lively, talkative acquaintance, having a drink here with Sam, and extraordinarily resembling Roosevelt off-stage.

Heavy with meditation, happy in being unobserved and not having to act up to the splendors of Fran, he paid his bill and ambled across the bridge
and into the cathedral.

It bothered him, as always, that there were no prim and cushioned pews such as he knew in Protestant churches in America; it made the cathedral
seem bare and a little unfriendly; but beside a vast pillar, eternal as mountains or the sea, he found a chair, tipped a verger, forgot his
irritation with people who buzzed up and wanted to guide him, and lost himself in impenetrable thoughts.

He roused himself to read, patiently, in Baedeker: "Geoffrey Plantagenet, son of Henry II of England, was buried beneath the high altar in 1186.
In 1430 Henry VI of England was crowned king of France and in 1560 Mary Stuart (afterward Mary Queen of Scots) was crowned as queen-consort of
Francis II. The coronation of Napoleon I and Josephine de Beauharnais by Pope Pius VII (1804) . . . was celebrated here with great ceremony."

(And in Saurier's studio brassy women were chattering about the races!)

Plantagenet! Rearing lions on scarlet banners edged with bullion. Mary Stuart and her proud little head. Napoleon himself--here, where Sam
Dodsworth was sitting.

"Humph!" he said.

He stared at the Rose Window, but he was seeing what it meant, not what it said. He saw life as something greater and more exciting than food and
a little sleep. He felt that he was no longer merely a pedler of motor cars; he felt that he could adventure into this Past about him--and
possibly adventure into the far more elusive Present. He saw, unhappily, that the Atkins and De Penable existence into which Fran had led him was
not the realization of the "great life" for which he had yearned, but its very negation--the bustle, the little snobberies, the cheap little
titles, the cheap little patronage of "art."

"I'm going to get out of this town and do something--Something exciting. And I'll make her go with me! I've been too weak with her," he said
weakly.



His longing for low and intelligent company could not be denied. He went to the New York Bar. Through the correspondent of a New York newspaper
whom he had known as a reporter in Zenith, Sam had met a dozen journalists there, and he felt at home with them. They did not heap on him the
slightly patronizing compliments which he had from the women in Madame de Penable's den of celebrities. He was stimulated by what was to the
journalists only commonplace shop-talk: how Trotsky really got along with Stalin--what Briand had said to Sir Austen Chamberlain--what was the
"low-down" on the international battle of oil.

This afternoon he met Ross Ireland.

Sam had heard of Ireland, roving foreign correspondent of the Quackenbos Feature Syndicate, as one of the best fellows among the American
journalists. The former Zenith reporter introduced Sam to him. Ross Ireland was a man of forty, as large as Sam, and in his over-sized rimless
spectacles he looked like a surgeon.

"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Dodsworth," he said, and his voice still had all the innocence of Iowa. "Staying over here long?"

"Well, yes--some months."

"This your first trip across?"

"Yes."

"Say, I've just been driving one of your Revelation cars in the jungle in India. Great performance, even in rough going--"

"India?"

"Yes, just back. Real Kipling country. Oh, I don't know as I saw any Mowglis gassing with tigers and sixteen-foot snakes, and I heard more about
jute and indigo than I did about Mrs. Hauksbees, but it certainly knocks your eye out! That big temple at Tanjore--tower eleven stories high, all
carved. And the life there--everything different--SMELLS different (and sometimes not so good!)--and the people still in masquerade costumes, and
queer curry kind of grub, and Eurasian shops where the Babus will tell you grand lies--every one good for a mail-story. You ought to get out
there, if you can take the time. And then beyond India, Burma--take a river-boat--regular floating market-place, with natives in funny turbans
squatting all over the decks--go up the Irrawaddy to Mandalay and on to Bhamo. Or you can get steamers at Rangoon for Penang and Sandoway and
Akyab and Chittagong and all kinds of fancy places."

(Rangoon! Akyab! Chittagong!)

"And then around to Java and China and Japan, and home by way of California."

"I'd like to do it," said Sam. "Paris is a lovely city, but--"

"Oh, Paris! Paris is nothing but a post-graduate course in Broadway."

"Looks good to me," said the ex-Zenith-newspaperman.

"It would! Paris is a town for Americans that can't stand work," said Ross Ireland. "I'm keen to see America; tickled to death I'm going back in
June. I've been away three years--first time I've ever been away. I'm homesick as the devil. But I like my America straight. I don't want it in
the form of a lot of expatriates sitting around Paris cafes. And when I want to travel, I want to TRAVEL! Say, you land in Bangkok, with that big
gold temple rising over the town, and the boatmen singing in--whatever it is that they DO sing in--or you go to Moscow and see the moujiks in
felt boots and sheepskin coats, with the church spires absolutely like white and gold lace-work against the sky--Say, that's travel!"



Yes. That's the stuff! Sam was going to travel like that. He'd go--Oh, to Constantinople, back through Italy or Austria, and home for his
thirtieth class reunion--just time to do it now, if he hustled. Then Fran and he might start out again next autumn and see Egypt and Morocco--
Yes.



It is a favorite American Credo that "if the acting is good enough, you can enjoy a play in a language you don't understand as well as in
English." Fran held to that credo. Sam urgently did not. He hated to sit through French plays, and when he returned to the hotel from the New
York Bar and Ross Ireland--from the Irrawaddy River and Chittagong--he found Fran with tickets for "Le Singe qui Parle," a slightly bad temper,
and the aviator Gioserro.

"You smell of whisky! Atrociously! Now please hurry and dress! Captain Gioserro and you and I are going to the theater. Now please hurry, can't
you? I'll order the cocktails meanwhile. As you see, I'm all ready. After the theater, we'll meet Renee de Penable and some other people and
dance."

As he dressed, Sam fretted, "French play! Humph! I won't know which is the husband and which is the lover for at least the first two acts!"



If he slept at the play, he did it ever so modestly and retiringly, and he was unusually polite to Madame de Penable. Fran was approving on their
way home, and quite as easily as though they were back in Zenith, he asserted while they were undressing:

"Fran, I've got an idea that--"

"Just unfasten this snap on my shoulder-strap, would you mind? Thanks. You were so nice tonight. Much the best-looking man in the room!"

"That's--"

"And I'm so glad you've come to like Renee de Penable. She's really a darling--so loyal. But, uh--Sam, I do wish you hadn't brought up that
question as to what right the French have in the Riff."

"But, my God, they talked about us in Haiti and Nicaragua first!"

"I know, but that's entirely different. This is an ANCIENT question, and of course Renee was shocked, and so was that English woman, Mrs. What's-
her-name. But it doesn't matter. I just thought I'd mention it."

And he'd thought he'd behaved so beautifully tonight!

"But," he went on heavily, becoming dimly irritated as he noted how little she heeded him while she brushed her hair, "I wanted to suggest that--
Look here, Fran, I've got kind of an idea. It's almost May, but we could get in a month or more on the Mediterranean and still have time to get
home late in June, and then I could go to my class reunion--thirtieth--"

"Really? THIRTIETH?"

"Oh, I'm not so old! But I mean: we haven't talked especially about when we would go home--"

"But I want to see a lot more of Europe. Oh, I haven't started!"

"Neither have I. I agree. But I just mean: there's several business things I ought to settle up at home, and there's this reunion, and I'd like
to see Emily and her new home, and Brent--"

"But perhaps we could get them to come over here this summer. Would you mind handing me the cold cream that's in the bathroom--no--no--I think
it's on the bureau--oh, thanks--"

"I thought we could go home for just a couple months, or maybe three, and then start out again. Say go West this time, and sail for China and
Japan and round to Rangoon and India and so on."

"Yes, I'd like to do that sometime. . . . Oh, dear, how sleepy I am! . . . But not now, of course, now that we know nice people here."

"But that's just what I mean! I don't--Oh, they're a lively bunch, and lots of 'em good families and so on, but I don't think they ARE nice."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean they're a bunch of wasters. All they do, Penable and her whole gang, and Atkins's hangers-on aren't much better, all they do is just
dance and chatter and show off their clothes. Their idea of a good time is just about that of a chorus-girl--"

Fran had been inattentive. She wasn't now. She snatched up a lace wrap, slapped it about her shoulders over her nightgown, and faced him, like a
snarling white cat:

"Sam! Let's get this straight. I've felt you've been sulking, that you've been too afraid to--"

"Too polite!"

"--say what you thought. Well, I'm sick and tired of having to apologize, yes, to APOLOGIZE, for the crime of having introduced you to some of
the nicest and most amusing people in Paris, and for having backed you up when they were offended by your boorishness! Am I to understand that
you regard Madame de Penable and her whole GANG, as you so elegantly call it, as simply rotters? May I point out to you that if I don't have
quite so lively an appreciation of such nature's noblemen as Mr. A. B. Hurd--"

"Fran!"

"--yet possibly I may be a little better equipped to understand really smart, cosmopolitan people than you are! Kindly let me remind you that
Renee de Penable is the intimate friend of the most exclusive aristocracy of the ancien regime here--"

"But is she? And what of it?"

"Will you KINDLY stop sneering? You that are so fond of accusing ME of sneering! And, my dear Samuel, you really don't do it so very well!
Delicate irony isn't your long suit, my dear good man!"

"Damn it, I won't be talked to like a stable boy!"

"Then don't act like one! And if I may be permitted to go on and answer the charges which YOU brought up, not I--the whole subject is thoroughly
distasteful to me--and oh, Sam, so vulgar, so beastly vulgar!" For a second she was dramatically mournful and hurt, but instantly she was a
charging Cossack again: "But when you attack any one that's been as sweet to me as Renee, all I can say is--Do you happen to realize that she is
the dearest friend of the Duchesse de Quatrefleurs--she's promised to take me down to the Duchesse's chateau in Burgundy--"

"She's never done it!"

"As it HAPPENS, the Duchesse is ill, just at the moment! And your charming remark illustrates perfectly what I mean by your sneering! . . . Or,
to take the example of Renee's friend, Mrs. Sittingwall. She's the widow of a very distinguished English general who was killed in the war--"

"He wasn't a general--he was a colonel--and now the woman is engaged to that old rip of a French stock-broker, Andillet."

"What of it? M. Andillet does dress too loudly, and he drives a car too fast, but he's a most amusing old dear, and he orders the best meal in
Paris. And knows cabinet ministers--bankers--diplomats--everybody that's influential."

"Well, he looks to me like a crook. And what about the young gigolos that are always hanging around Mrs. Penable?"

"I do think it's too gracious of you to take the word 'gigolo,' which I taught you in the first place--"

"You did not!"

"--and use it against me, my dear polylingual Sam! I suppose you are referring to boys like Gioserro and Billy Dawson. Yes, they're not at all
like American business men, are they! They actually enjoy being charming to women, they enjoy sharing their leisure with women, they dance
beautifully, they talk about something besides the stockmarket--"

"Oh, they enjoy leisure, all right! Oh, now, Fran, I don't mean to be nasty about them, but you know they graft on women--"

"My dear man, Captain Gioserro (and he could call himself Count Gioserro, if he wanted to!) has a perfectly good family income, as his people
have had before him, for generations--"

"Whoa now! Hold up! I question his having a very GOOD family income. I notice that whenever he's with us, he always manages to let me pay. Not
that I mind, but--Why say, I've never seen him spend a cent except tonight, when he gave ten centimes to the fellow that opened the cab door. Now
please listen, Fran, and don't go off into a tantrum. Don't you and Mrs. Penable almost always pay the bills--for feeds, for taxis, for tips, for
tickets--for Gioserro and young Dawson and most of these other slick young men that she has hanging around?"

"What of it? We can afford it. (The name, by the way, as I have remarked several hundred times before, is MADAME DE PENABLE!) Or are you--" She
became regally outraged and deliberate. "Are you perhaps hinting that because you so generously support me, you have the right to dictate on whom
and for what I spend every cent? Do you desire me to give you a detailed account of my expenses, like an office boy? Then let me remind you--oh,
this is SO distasteful to me, but I must remind you that I have twenty thousand a year of my own, and now that I have a chance to be happy, with
amusing people--"

She was sobbing. He caught her shoulders, and demanded, "Will you stop self-dramatizing yourself, my young lady? You know, and you know good and
well, that I'm criticizing these young men for grafting just because I want to point out that they're no good; nothing but a lot of butterflies."

She broke away from his grasp and from her own sobs, and she was tart again: "Then thank God for the butterflies! I'm so tired of the worthy
ants! . . . Sam, we might just as well have this out . . . if we're going on together."

The last five words chilled him. He was incredulous. She seemed a little to mean it, and she went on resolutely:

"Let's get it straight--just what we are up to; what we want. Now that we are meeting them, do you appreciate people with wit and elegance, or
have you already had enough of them? Are you going to insist on returning to--oh, decent enough people, but people that can't see anything in
life more amusing than poker and golf and motoring, that are afraid of suave manners, that think to be roughneck is to be strong? Does the
accumulated civilization of two thousand years of Europe mean something to you or--"

"Oh, come off it, Fran! I'm not a roughneck and you know it. And I'm not uncivilized. And I like nice manners. But I like nice manners in people
that are something more than amateur head-waiters and--And after all, a rock takes a better polish than a sponge! These people, even Penable
herself, are parrots. What I'd like to meet--Well, you take the colonial administrators and so on out in the British possessions. People that are
doing something besides going night after night to these restaurants where your gigolos hang out--"

"Sam, if you don't mind, I think I've stood all the insults to my friends that I can for one night! You can think up a few new ones for tomorrow.
I'm going to sleep. And now."

Whether she slept or not, she was rigidly silent, her face turned from him.

He expected her to be soft, fluttery, apologetic, in the morning. But, awakening at nine, she looked unrepentant as steel. He trundled out talk
about breakfast, about the laundry, then he grumbled, "I don't know that I made myself quite clear last evening--"

"Oh yes, you did! Thoroughly! And I don't think I care to discuss it. Shall we not say anything more about it?" She was so brightly forgiving and
superior that he was infuriated. "I'm going out now. I'll be back here about twelve. I'm lunching with Renee de Penable, and if you think you can
endure another hour with my degenerate friends, I should be glad to have you join us."

She vanished into the bathroom, to dress, and nothing more could be get out of her. When she was gone, he sat in bathrobe and slippers, over a
second order of coffee.

She'd never before let a quarrel last overnight, at least when she'd been in the wrong--

Or was it possible that she had not been in the wrong in their controversy?

And (each second he was more confused) just what was the controversy about?

Anyway, she couldn't really have meant anything by her "if we're going on together." But suppose she had? Married couples did break up, quite
incredibly, after years. Did he, in order to hold her, have to obey her, to associate forever with peacocks like this Mrs. Sittingwall and this
fellow Andillet--who was certainly a little more than friendly with the Penable woman?

No, hanged if he would!

But if that meant losing Fran? Good God! Why, now that he had no work, he had nothing to absorb him save Fran, Emily, Brent, and three or four
friends like Tub Pearson. Nor would he have anything new: he doubted if any other job could stimulate him like building up the Revelation
Company; he doubted if he would make any new friends; he doubted if travel, pictures, music, hobbies, would ever be anything more than diversions
interesting for an hour at a time. And of what he had left to keep life tolerable, Fran was first. She was the reason for everything! It was a
second, a renewed Fran that he loved in his daughter Emily. His business and his making of money had been all for Fran--well no, maybe not all--
hell! how hard it was to be honest about one's own self--maybe not all--fun putting business across, too--but she'd been the chief reason for it,
anyway. As for his friends--Why, he'd've chucked even Tub, if Fran hadn't liked him!

Fran! That just the other day had been a girl, cool and sparkling and strange, on the Canoe Club porch--Good Lord, the Canoe Club had burned down
twenty years ago.

In the radiant May of Paris, with the horse chestnuts out on the Champs Elysees, he sat huddled, feeling cold.



He went to lunch with Fran, Madame de Penable, and Billy Dawson, a young American who was the airiest and most objectionable of the De Penable's
gentlemen valets. Sam was gravely polite. For two weeks he went with Fran and the De Penable's court to all sorts of restaurants reeking with
cigarette smoke and expensive perfume and smart scandal. Between times, he sneaked off, like a small boy going to the circus, to low places,
looking particularly for the roving correspondent, Ross Ireland, and when he found that Ireland was sailing on June fifteenth on the Aquitania,
which would arrive in time for Sam's thirtieth reunion at Yale, he anxiously engaged a stateroom for "self & wife." He liked Ross Ireland; he
found particularly amusing, very like his own cultural pretenses, the fact that since Ireland was totally unable to learn any language save
Iowan, he thundered that English was "enough to take anybody anywhere" and that "these fellows that talk about your having to know French if
you're going to do political stuff in Europe are just trying to show what smart guys they are." And he liked the way in which Ireland mingled
stories of Burmese temples with stories of Old Doc Jevons back t' home in Ioway.

This lowness Sam hid from his wife, and hid the fact that he was agonizingly bored by not having enough to do. Yet his devotion did not win her
back. There was a courteous coolness about her, always.

When he had definitely to know about returning to America, she answered briskly:

"Yes, I've thought it over. I can understand that you need to go back. But I'm not going. I've practically promised Renee de Penable to take a
villa with her near Montreux for the summer. But I want you to go and see Tub and every one and thoroughly enjoy yourself, and then come back and
join me in the late summer, and we'll think about the Orient."



But when she saw him off at the Gare St. Lazare she was suddenly softened.

She cried; she clung; she sobbed, "Oh, I didn't realize how much I'll miss you! Perhaps I'll come join you in Zenith. Do have the very best time
you can, darling. Go camping with Tub--and give him my love--and tell him and Matey I hope they'll come over here--and try to get Em and Brent to
come. Oh, my dear, forgive your idiotic, feather-brained wife! But let her have her foolish fling now! I did make a real home for you, didn't I?
I shall again. Take care of yourself, my dear, and write me every day, and don't be angry with me--or do be angry, if it'll make you any happier!
Bless you!"

And the first day out she sent him a radio: "You are a big brown bear and worth seventy-nine thousand gigolos even when their hair greased best
butter stop did I remember to tell you that I adore you."



CHAPTER 16


With Ambrose Channel ahead of them, Sam Dodsworth and his friend Ross Ireland spent a considerable part of their time in the smoking-room of the
Aquitania arguing with other passengers about the glories of America. Sam was appreciative enough, but Ross was eloquent, he was lyric, he was
tremendous.

At praise of Paris, Cambodia, Oslo, Glasgow, or any other foreign pride, he snorted, "Look here, son, that's all applesauce, and I KNOW! I've
been hiking for three years. I've interviewed Count Bethlen and I've paddled up the Congo; I've done a swell piece about the Lena Gold Fields and
I've driven three thousand miles in England. And believe me, I'm glad to be getting back to a real country, buddy!

"New York? Noisy? Say, why wouldn't it be noisy? It's got something going on! Believe me, they're remodeling all the old parts of Heaven after
New York skyscrapers! Say, if we get past the perils of the deep and I have the chance to hang my hat up in Park Row again, you'll never get me
farther away than an Elks' Convention at Atlantic City! And don't let anybody tell you that the Elks and the Rotarians and the National Civic
Federation are any more grab-it-all than the English merchant, who hates our dollar-chasing so much that he wants to keep us from it by copping
all the dollars there are to chase, or the elegant highbrow Frenchman who doesn't love the franc any more than he loves God. Why say, even about
drinking--I'll admit I like a sidewalk cafe better than I do a speak-easy, but once I round up my old bunch at Denny's and have a chance to stick
my legs under the table with a lot of real home-baked he-Americans instead of these imitation-Frog Americans that loaf around abroad--Boy!"



Sam discovered, dropping into Ross Ireland's stateroom, that Ross was guilty of secret intellectual practises. Except when, in morning clothes,
he was interviewing Lord Chancellors and Generals Commanding, Ross felt that he must prove his sturdy independence by saying "Buddy," "Where
d'you get that stuff," and "Oh, bologny." He was never, by any chance, "doing an analytical study"--at most he was "writing a little piece." He
addressed English stewards as "Cap'n," he asked the Cockney smoking-room steward for his "check," and almost his only French expression was
"viskey-soda." He announced, widely and loudly, that any newspaperman who called himself a "journalist" was a Big Stiff, a Phoney Highbrow, and
an Imitation Limey. He said that any foreign correspondent who read history, went to concerts, or wore spats was "showing off."

But Sam discovered that Ross Ireland was guilty of reading vast and gloomy volumes of history; that he admired Conrad more than Conan Doyle; that
he had a sneaking preference of chess to poker; and that he was irritably proud of having his evening clothes made in London.

That such a man, violently American yet not untraveled in distant coasts, should so rejoice at going back made Sam the more convinced about
returning to his own. Of the vast and polished elegancies of the Aquitania he had little impression, none of the excitement about the steely
resolution of ships which he had known on the Ultima, because all his excitement was focused on the blessed people he was going to see.

Tub Pearson--

He heard himself saying, "Well, you fat little runt! You horse-thief! Golly, I'm glad to see you!"

He stood forward on the promenade deck, fancying that his heart beat in rhythm with the rise and the fall of the prow, exulting as the ship
slashed through the miles between him and home. He seemed a kindly but stolid figure there, a big man in a gray Burberry and a gray cap, a
competent and unsentimental man. But he was boiling with sentiment. Once at night, when he saw the lights of a ship ahead, he pretended that they
were the shore lights of Long Island, and he ardently imagined the dear familiarities--wide streets, clashing traffic, brick garages, the
insolent splendor of skyscrapers and, toward the country, miles of white and green little houses where the sort of men he understood played games
he understood, poker and bridge, and listened on the radio to the sort of humor and music that he understood. And before every other bungalow was
a Revelation car.

"--and I'm going to STAY!" he exulted.



All the way over, Ross Ireland and he had boasted to such passengers as had never seen America that they would not "be able to believe their
eyes" when they steamed up North River. Ross chanted, "Greatest sight in the world--skyscrapers one after another--thirty, forty, fifty stories
high, and beautiful--say! they make Cologne Cathedral look like a Methodist chapel and the Eiffel Tower look like an umbrella with the cover
off!"

They both, indeed, made so many protestations about the sight of New York harbor that Sam began to wonder whether he really was going to be as
thrilled as he was going to be thrilled. He remembered how, after the most conversational anticipation with Fran, he had been disappointed by his
first sight of Notre Dame. It had seemed low and hulking--not half so impressive as the lath-and-plaster Notre Dame in the movie film. He managed
to fret rather ardently. He hoped to be uplifted by New York as a young lover hopes to be enraptured by the sight of his lady.



They came through the Narrows, into New York harbor, early in the June morning. Sam was up at five, delighted by the friendly green of the lawn
at Fort Hamilton, after the shifting sea. It was extraordinarily hot for early summer, a bit uncomfortable even on deck, and a fog hid the
horizon. Sam was afraid that he was not to have his rediscovery of New York. After quarantine, as they trudged from Staten Island toward North
River, he could see only anchored tramp steamers, and a huge water-beetle of a ferry boat, hoarse-voiced and insulting. Then the fog lifted, and
he cried "My God!" High up shone the towers and spires of an enchanted city floating upon the mist, pyramids and domes glistening in the early
sun, vast walls studded with golden windows, spellbound and incredible.

Ross Ireland, beside him, muttered "Gee!" and then, "Say, does it make you proud to be coming home to that?"

It is true that when they swaggered up North River, the debris of docks and warehouses and factories on the riverbank seemed rather littered. The
thickening heat glared round them, and the river was greasy with swirls of fantastically colored oil films. But as they were cumbersomely warped
into the dock, as Sam heard the good American shouts from the dark hedge of people waiting on the pier; "Attaboy!" and "Where'd you get the
monocle?" and "How'd you leave Mary?" and "Oh, come on--have a heart!--sneak me ONE bottle ashore!"--he muttered over and over, "It's kind of
nice to be home!"



Then there were the customs.

Not that the inspectors were so impolite as is fabled, but it is irritating to be suspected of smuggling liquor, particularly when, like Sam, you
are smuggling liquor. He had a quart of pre-war Scotch among the suits in a wardrobe trunk, and the inspector found it, immediately.

"What's this? What d'you call this?"

"Why! It looks like a bottle!" said Sam, affably. "I can't imagine how it got there! Let me present it to you."

And they fined him five dollars. But what was worse was that being destitute of liquor caused in Sam a most indignant thirst--Sam Dodsworth, who
had never in his life taken a drink before noon, except once after a certain football game in New Haven. He HAD to have--

The taxi-driver--Sam came to him after hours of paying customs-fees, of getting necessitous porters, in a high state of boredom, to trundle his
luggage along the immensity of cement floor and through to freedom, of seeing it shot perilously down the most efficient and disconcerting moving
belt, and of having it and himself thrown gasping into the lions' den of New York traffic--the taxi-driver gave Sam his first welcome to America.

"Wherejuh wanna go?" he growled.

It shocked Sam to find how jarred he was by this demonstration of democracy. Like most Americans in Paris, he had been insisting that all French
taxi-drivers were bandits, but now they seemed to him like playful and cuddling children.



It was achingly hot in the side streets leading from the piers, and appallingly dirty. In front of warehouses and mean brick houses turned into
tenements were flying newspapers, piles of bottles and rags and manure. Gritty clouds of ashes blew from open garbage cans, and tangled with the
heat was New York's summertime stench of rotten bananas, unwashed laundry, ancient bedding, and wet pavements. In front of the taxicab, making
Sam's heart stop with fear, darted ragged small boys (quite cheerful, and illogically healthy); and on the flimsy iron balconies of fire-escapes
sat mothers with hair dragging across their eyes, nursing babies who in between sups wailed against the unjust heat. It was, Sam felt, a city
nervous as a thwarted woman. (Sam still believed in male strength and female weakness.) It seemed so masculine in its stalwart buildings, but
there was nothing masculine in its heat-shocked, clamor-maddened nerves. The traffic policemen raged at Sam's taxi-driver, the taxi-driver cursed
all the truck-drivers, and, above the roaring of their engines, the truck-drivers cursed everybody on the street.

Ninth Avenue was insane with the banging of the Elevated; Eighth Avenue was a frontier camp of little shops; Seventh Avenue was a bedlam of
traffic between loft buildings with enormous signs--"Lowenstein & Putski, Garments for Little Gents," and "The Gay Life Brassiere, Rothweiser and
Gitz"; Sixth Avenue combined the roar of Ninth with the nastiness of Eighth and the charging traffic of Seventh; and when in relief Sam saw the
stateliness of Fifth Avenue, there was an inhuman mass of shiny cars from curb to curb.

The Sam Dodsworth who considered himself tireless was exhausted when he crawled into the cool refuge of his hotel. He sat by the window in his
room, looking at the sullen stretch of the lofty office-building opposite, and longed for a drink.

"Conservatively, I'd give twenty-five dollars right now for the bottle of Scotch that the customs man took away from me. . . . Oh, Lord! . . . I
don't like New York so well, in weather like this. I'll be glad to get out into the country. That's the real America. . . . I hope it will be! .
. . I can see where I'm not going to complain about having too much leisure, the way I did in Paris! And I want that drink!"

It did not improve his opinion of Prohibition--it made the whole business seem the more imbecile and annoying and hypocritical--that after a
telephone call, within half an hour he had a case of whisky in his room, and that he was taking a drink far earlier in the day than he would ever
have done in Paris.

He had many people to see in New York before he went to New Haven for his class reunion. But he telephoned to no one--with the exception of the
bootlegger. He had only the energy to sit by the window, getting what breeze there was, trying to ignore the ceaseless menace of the city roar,
feeling more homeless than in Europe, trying to compose a lively cable to Fran and to get Brent, in New Haven, on the telephone.

He had not cabled Brent his date of sailing. "Boy's probably tied up with a lot of exams and things; when I land in New York I'll find out by
'phone when it's convenient for him to come down to New York." Brent was not to be found now by telephone. Sam sent him a telegram, and that was
quite all that he felt like doing. He rested till one, till half-past. He had a small lunch, in his room, and the joy of having proper American
sugar corn almost revived him, but afterward he sat by the window again till three, brooding. Lassitude bound him like a vast cobweb.

What was he doing here in New York? What was he doing anywhere? What reason had he for living? He was not necessary to Fran in Paris. And the
motor-car industry seemed to be spinning on quite cheerily without him.

He faced his discovery--the incident had happened at his entrance to the hotel, but he had not admitted it to his consciousness till now.
Alighting from his taxicab he had seen the new model Revelation car, as produced by the Unit Automotive Company, at three hundred dollars less
than Sam's former price. He had wanted to hate it, to declare that it was tinny and wretched, but he had had to admit that it was a marvel of
trimness, with the body swung lower, the windshield more raking. He felt antiquated. The U.A.C. had created this new model in six months; with
his own organization he could not have produced it in less than a year. And he would have held it till the autumn motor shows and brought it out
pompously, as though he were a priest grudgingly letting the laity behold his mysteries. Were the U.A.C. making light of seasons and
announcement-dates--just tossing off new models as though they were cans of corn?

It came to him that he had not known when the new Revelation would be out. For the first months of his absence he had heard often from Alec
Kynance, received all the gossip, with many invitations to return. He had heard but little the past three months. Was he out of it--perhaps
forever?

He had come back to America feeling that the world of motors longed for him; he felt, this hot confused afternoon, that no one cared. . . . It
was true that, to keep his time free, he had told no one he was arriving, but confound it, they might have found out somehow--

Come to think of it, not one of the reporters who had boarded the Aquitania and hunted down incoming celebrities--the Polish tennis champion, the
famous radio-announcer who had been perfecting his art in Berlin, the latest New York-Paris divorcee--had paid attention to him. Yet when he had
gone abroad, they had interviewed him as a Representative American Business Man--

He was frightened by his drop into insignificance.

At half-past three he was startled and cheered by a telephone-call:

"Hello? Dodsworth? This is Ross Ireland. Say, I'm in the same hotel. Doing anything? Mind if I run up for a minute?"

Ireland burst in, red, collar wilted, panting.

"Say, Dodsworth, am I crazy? Do I look crazy?"

"No, you look hot."

"Hot? Hell! I've been hot in Rangoon. But I sat back in a nice carriage, in my pretty little white suit and my sun helmet, and took it easy. I
didn't feel as though I'd been in two hundred and twenty-seven train collisions, one right after another. Do you know what I've found out? I hate
this damn' town! It's the dirtiest, noisiest, craziest hole I was ever in! I hate it--me that's been going up and down the face of the earth for
the last three years, shooting my face off and telling everybody what a swell capital New York is.

"What you got to drink? Oh, God, only whisky? Well, let's have a look at it.

"Well, this morning I didn't even stop to unpack. I was going to see the dear old home town--the dear old neighbors, by heck, down on Park Row. I
got down to the Quackenbos office, and the office boy hadn't ever heard my name--I've only been sending in three columns a week, signed, for
three years! But he found a stenographer who thought she'd heard of me, and they actually let me in to see the old man--mind you, to get in to
see him was sixteen times harder than it would be to see King George at Buckingham Palace, and when I did get in, there he was with his feet in a
desk drawer reading the jokes in the New Yorker. Well, he was all right. He jumped up and told me I was the white-haired boy, and the sight of
me'd just about saved him from typhoid, and we talked a whole half hour, and then made a date to finish up our business at lunch, tomorrow! Oh
no, he didn't have one minute till then! Tonight--God, no, he had to help open up a new roof garden.

"Oh, I've been the boiled mutton-head! I've been going around Europe and Asia telling the heathen that the reason we hustle so in New York is
because we get so much done. I never discovered till today that we do all this hustling, all this jamming in subways, all this elbowing into
elevators, to keep ourselves occupied and keep from getting anything done! Say, I'll bet I accomplished more honest-to-God work in Vienna in
three hours than I will here in three days! Those Austrian hicks don't have any bright office boys or filing-systems to prevent them from talking
business. So they go home for two hours' lunch. Poor devils! No chance to ride on the subway! And only cafes to sit around in, instead of night
clubs. Awful life!

"Well, when I'd got this whole half hour in with the boss--he took up most of it telling a swell new smutty story he'd just heard--one I used to
tell back in Ioway in 1900--I drifted over to the Chronicle to see the bunch I used to work with. . . . I was city editor there once! . . . Half
of the bunch were aus. Gone into politics, I guess. . . . The other half were glad to see me, so far as I could figure out, but they'd gone and
got married or learned to play bridge or taken to teaching Sunday School or some immoral practise like that, and by golly not one of 'em could I
get for dinner and a show tonight. By the way, you don't happen to be free for tonight, Dodsworth, do you? Grand! Tickled to death!

"Well, I went out to lunch with one of the fellows on the Sunday edition. He suggested some whisky, but I wanted something cool. He said he knew
a place where we could get some real genuine Italian Chianti--and say, he called it 'genuwine Ytalian' too. As a joke. I believe he taught
English in Harvard for a year. But being a hard-boiled newspaperman, of course he had to be a roughneck, to show he wasn't pedantic. . . . Like
me, I guess. I've been pulling that same lowbrow pose myself.

"But anyway: we look up this genuwine Ytalian dump--I guess, from the smell, they used it as a laundry till it got too dirty--and the Wop brought
on a bottle of something that was just about as much like Chianti as I'm like a lily of the valley. Honestly, Sam, it tasted like vinegar that'd
been used on beets just once too often.

"And then--Oh, I suppose, being just back after my first long hike, I felt I had a Chautauqua message for Young America--I suppose I felt I was a
Peary bringing home the Pole under my arm. I tried to tell this chap how much I knew about Burma, and how chummy I was with Lord Beaverbrook, and
all the news about the land problem in Upper Silesia, and was he interested? Say, he was about as much interested as I'd be in a chatty account
of the advancement of Christian Science in Liberia! But he had a lot of important news for me. Golly! Bill Smith'd had a raise of twenty bucks a
week! Pete Brown is going to edit the hockey gossip, instead of Mike Magoon! The Edam Restaurant is going to have a new jazz orchestra! The
Fishback Portable Typewriter has gone up five dollars in price! Ellen Whoozis, the cocktail-party queen, who writes the Necking Notes, is going
to marry the religious editor!

"Say, it was exactly like going back to the dear old Home Town in Ioway, after my first three years in New York! That time I wanted to tell the
home-town boys all the news about the Brooklyn Ridge and immorality, and they wanted to talk about Henry Hick's new flivver!

"Well, I guess it's all about alike, really--Buddhism in Burma and Henry's flivver. It's all neighborhood gossip, with different kinds of
neighbors. Only--

"But it isn't the same! I've seen--oh, God, Sam, I've seen the jungle at dawn, and these fellows have stayed here, stuck at little desks, and
never drifted five steps away from their regular route from home, to the office, to the speak-easy, to the office, to the movie, to home. I was
on a ship afire in the Persian Gulf--

"I know it's just vanity, Sam, but there ARE things outside America--Whether they're ever going to have sense enough to make a Pan-Europa there--
whether Britain is going to recognize Russia, and who's going to get Russian oil--what will become of Poland--what Fascism really means in Italy;
things that ought to be almost as interesting as the next baseball game. But these lads that've stuck here in New York, they're so self-satisfied
(like I was once!) that they don't care a hang for anything beyond the current price of gin! They don't know there is a Europe, beyond the Paris
bars. Why even in my shop--I carry on in Europe as though I were the great, three-star, two-tailed special foreign correspondent but here (it's a
fact!) the fellow that does the weekly cartoon about Farmer Hiram Winterbottom gets three times my salary--say, if HE came into the office, old
Quackenbos would give him the whole day!

"Well, now that I've told you what a nice, lace-collared, abused darling I am, let's--

"But this town, that I've been looking forward to--(Man, do you realize we could sail back on the Aqui in a week? Think of that nice cool corner
in the smoking-room!) I've found that the one and only up-to-date, new, novel, ingenious way of getting anywhere in this burg, if you want to GET
there, is to walk! It takes a taxi, in this traffic, ten minutes to make ten blocks. And the subway--How many years since you've been in the
subway? Well, don't! I thought I was a pretty big guy, and fairly husky, but say, the subway guard at the Grand Central just stuck his knee in
the middle of my back and rammed me into a car that was already plumb-full like I was a three-year-old child! And I stood up as far as Brooklyn
Bridge, with my nose in the neck of a garbage-wholesaler! Say, I feel like an anarchist! I want to blow up the whole town!

"Then, after lunch, I wanted to buy a few real first-edition suits of American athletic underwear, so I went to Mosheim's department store. Seen
their new building? Looks like a twenty-story ice-palace. Windows full of diamonds and satins and ivory and antique Spanish furniture, and
lingerie that would make a movie-actress blush. 'City of luxury--Europe beat a mile!' says I. 'Extra! Pleasure Capital of the World Discovered by
H. Ross Ireland!' And then I tried to get into the store. Honestly, Sam. I'll be quite a husky fellow when I get my strenth. I used to play
center and wrestle heavyweight in the University of Iowa. But, by golly, I couldn't hardly wedge my way in through the doors. There was one
stream of maniacs rushing out and another rushing in, as though it was a fire, and every aisle was jammed, and then when you got to the proper
counter--

"Well, I've got good and plenty sore at the way the hired help treat you abroad. I've had a Turkish rug-vendor go crazy when I didn't want to pay
more'n twice the price of a rug; I've had a hard-boiled Greek mate bawl hell out of me because he tripped over me on deck; I've had a gondolier
say what he thought of my tip. But anyway, those fellows treated you as though you were almost their equals. It's like Chesterton says--if a
fellow kicks his butler down-stairs, it doesn't show any lack of democracy; it's only when he feels too superior to his butler to touch him that
he's really snooty. And that's how the nice bright young gent at the underwear-counter treated me. He had about six people to wait on, and unless
I spoke quick and took what he gave me, he wasn't going to waste time on me, and he kept looking at me with a 'You big hick, don't try to fool
me, that ain't no real New York suit you got on--back to Yankton.'

"Then I tried to get out of the store. One fellow elbowing you in the stomach and another jabbing you in the back, and the elevator man hollering
'Step lively, please,' till you wanted to sock him in the nose. Honestly, I felt like a refugee driven by the Cossacks--no, I didn't feel that
human; I felt like I was one of a bunch of steers driven down the runway to the slaughter-house. God, what a town! Luxury! Gold! Everything but
self-respect and decency and privacy!

"And what an oration! That's the longest speech I've made since I caught my No.1 Boy in Burma wearing my best pants!"

"Well," Sam soothed, "it'll be better when you get out into the country."

"But I don't like the country! Being a hick by origin, I like cities. I had enough cornfields and manure-piles before I ran away, at fourteen.
And from what I heard at lunch, all the other towns in America are becoming about as bad as New York--traffic jams and big movie theaters and
radios yapping everywhere and everybody has to have electric dish-washers and vacuum cleaners and each family has to have not one car, by golly,
but two or three--and all on the installment plan! But I guess any of those burgs would be better than this New York monkey jungle.

"And I thought I knew this town! Ten years I put in here! But honestly, it's sixteen times as bad as it was three years ago, seems to me. Ought
to be lovely three years from NOW! And foreign--say, when you see a real old-fashioned American face on the street, you wonder how he got here. I
think I'll go back to London and see some Americans!"



Ross, Sam felt, was exaggerating. But when Ross had gone and he had roused himself from his lassitude for a walk--for a hot crawl--he felt lost
and small and alien in the immense conflict of the steaming streets.

And he had no place to go. He realized that this capital, barbaric with gold and marble, provided every human necessity save a place, a cafe or a
plaza or a not-too-lady-like tea-shop, in which he could sit and be human. Well! He could go to the Metropolitan Art Gallery, the Aquarium, the
dusty benches of Central Park, or sit gently in a nice varnished pew in a Protestant Church.

People running with suit-cases nicked his legs, small active Jews caromed into him, flappers with faces powdered almost purple looked derisively
at his wandering and bucolic mildness, a surf of sweaty undistinguishable people swept over him, shop-windows of incredible aloof expensiveness
stared at him, and at every street-crossing he was held up by the wave of traffic, as he crept over to Fifth Avenue, down to Forty-second, past
leering cheap-jack shops and restaurants, over to Sixth and back again to the Grand Central Station.

He stood contemplatively (he who a year ago would never have stood thus, but would have rushed with the most earnest of them) on the balcony
overlooking the shining acres of floor of the Grand Central Station, like a roofed-over Place de la Concorde. Why, he wondered, was it that the
immensity of Notre Dame or St. Paul's did not dwarf and make ridiculous the figures of the worshippers as this vastness did the figures of
travelers galloping to train-gates? Was it because the little people, dark and insignificant in the cathedrals, were yet dignified, self-
possessed, seeking the ways of God, whereas here they were busy with the ludicrous activity of insects?

He fancied that this was veritably the temple of a new divinity, the God of Speed.

Of its adherents it demanded as much superstitious credulity as any of the outworn deities--demanded a belief that Going Somewhere, Going
Quickly, Going Often, were in themselves holy and greatly to be striven for. A demanding God, this Speed, less good-natured than the elder Gods
with their faults, their amours, their vanity so easily pleased by garlands and flattery; an abstract, faultless, and insatiable God, who once he
had been offered a hundred miles an hour, straight-way demanded a hundred and fifty.

And with his motor cars Sam had contributed to the birth of this new religion, and in the pleasant leisure of Europe he had longed for its
monastic asperities! He blasphemed against it now, longing for the shabbiest bar on the raggedest side street of Paris.

He shook his great shaggy head as he looked down on traveling-salesmen importantly parading before bag-laden red-caps, on fagged brokers with
clanking bags of golf sticks, on fretful women, contemptuous overdressed women, and sleek young men in white knickerbockers. They seemed to him
driven to madness by the mad God of Speed that themselves had created--and Sam Dodsworth had created.



Sam and Ross Ireland foolishly tried to take a taxicab to the theater. When they were already half an hour late, they got out and walked the last
six blocks. They saw a number of delightful and naked young women, as naked as they would have been at Folies-Bergere.

"From the breaths around us, I guess there's a few New Yorkers who haven't heard about Prohibition," sighed Ross, as they paced the street in the
entr'acte. "Well, fortunately, the preachers haven't enough influence with God yet to keep the girls from being naked. They'll have to fix that
up as soon as Prohibition really goes over--arrange to have the girls born with flannel nighties on. . . . Honestly, Sam, I don't get these here
United States. We let librarians censor all the books, and yet we have musical comedies like this--just as raw as Paris. We go around hollering
that we're the only bona fide friends of democracy and self-determination, and yet with Haiti and Nicaragua we're doing everything we accused
Germany of doing in Belgium, and--you mark my word--within a year we'll be starting a Big Navy campaign for the purpose of bullying the world as
Great Britain never thought of doing. We boast of scientific investigation, and yet we're the only supposedly civilized country where thousands
of supposedly sane citizens will listen to an illiterate clodhopping preacher or politician setting himself up as an authority on biology and
attacking evolution."



It was after the wearisome glare of the musical comedy, at a speak-easy which was precisely like an old-fashioned bar except that the whisky was
bad, that Ross Ireland raged on:

"Yes, and to have a little more of our American paradox, we have more sentimental sobbing over poor de-uh mother in the movies, and more lynching
of negroes, than would be possible anywhere else in the world! More space, and more crowded tenements; more hard-boiled pioneers, and more sickly
discontented wives; more Nancies among young men; more highbrow lectures, and more laughing-hyena comic strips and more slang--Well, take me. I'm
supposed to be a newspaperman. I've seen a lot--and read a whale of a lot more than I ever admit. I have ideas, and I even have a vocabulary. But
I'm so American that if I ever admit I'm interested in ideas, if I ever phrase a sentence grammatically, if I don't try to sound like a
longshoreman, I'm afraid that some damned little garage-proprietor will think I'm trying to be pedantic! Oh, I've learned a lot about myself and
my beloved America today!"

"Just the same, Ross, I prefer this country to--"

"Hell, so do I! Things I can remember, people I've talked to, knocking around this country, High Sierras to the Cape Cod cranberry-bogs. Old Pop
Conover, that used to be a Pony Express Rider, going lickety-split, risking his life among the Indians--I remember him at eighty, the whitest old
man you ever saw; lived in a little shack in my town in Iowa, baching it--had an old chair made out of a flour-barrel. Say, he'd tell us kids
stories by the hour; he'd put up a tramp for the night; and he'd've received a king just the same way. Never occurred to him that he was any
better than the tramp or any worse than a king. He was a real American. And I've seen the bunch at football games--nice clean youngsters. But
we're turning the whole thing into a six-day bicycle race. And with motor-cycles instead of the legs that we used to have once!"



With Ross Ireland talking always--assailing the American bustle except at such times as Sam complained of it, whereupon Ross would defend it
furiously--they ambled to a Broadway cabaret.

It was called "The Georgia Cabin," it specialized in Chicken Maryland and yams and beaten biscuit, and the orchestra played "Dixie" every half
hour, to great cheering. Aside from Ross and Sam, everybody in the place was either a Jew or a Greek. It was so full of quaintness and
expensiveness. The walls were in monstrous overblown imitation of a log cabin; and round the tiny fenced dancing-floor, so jammed that the
dancers looked like rush-hour subway passengers moving in sudden amorous insanity, was the Broadway idea of a rail-fence.

The cover charge was two dollars apiece. They had two lemonades, at seventy-five cents each, with a quarter tip to the Hellenic waiter--at which
he grumbled--and a quarter to the trim and cold-eyed hat-girl--at which she snapped, "Another pair of cheap skates!"



They said little as they marched toward their hotel. Over Sam, thick, palpable, like a shroud, was the lassitude he had felt in Paris. He was in
a dream; nothing was real in all this harsh reality of trolley bells, furious elevated trains, swooping taxicabs, the jabbering crowds. The heat
was churning up into a thunderstorm. Lightning revealed the cornices of the inhumanly lofty buildings. The whole air was menacing, yet he felt
the menace indifferently, and heavily he said good night to Ross Ireland.

The storm exploded as he stood at the window of his hotel room. Every lightning flash threw into maniacal high relief the vast yellow wall of the
building opposite, and its innumerable glaring windows; and in the darknesses between flashes he could imagine the building crashing over on him.
It was terrifying as a volcanic eruption, even to Sam Dodsworth, who was not greatly given to fear. Yet terror could not break up the crust of
dull loneliness which encased him.

He turned from the window with a lifeless step and went drearily to bed, to lie half awake. He muttered only, "This hustle of American life--
regular battle--is it going to be too much for me, now I'm out of the habit?"

And, "Oh, God, Fran, I am so lonely for you!"



CHAPTER 17


But it was a pleasanter and more kindly America that he found the next evening, when he sat with Elon Richards, chairman of the board of the
Goodwood National Bank, on the terrace at Willow Marsh, Richards' place on Long Island.

In the morning, Sam's son, Brent, telephoned from New Haven that he would finish his examinations in two days and be down for a real bender with
his father. In the afternoon Sam labored mightily with Alec Kynance in the New York office of the U.A.C. He was again offered a vice presidency
of the U.A.C. and again he refused.

He was vague about his refusal.

"Alec, it's hard to explain it--just feel that I've given most of my life to making motor cars, and now I'd like to sit around and visit with
myself and get acquainted. Yes, I was lonely in Paris. I admit it. But it's a job I've started, and I'm not going to give it up yet."

Kynance was sharp.

"I don't know's I can ever make this offer again."

Sam scarcely heard him. He--of old-time the steadily attentive--was wool-gathering: "I'll never be good for anything BUT business, but why not
have a little fun and try something new--big orange-grove in Florida, or real estate?"

When Sam telephoned to Richards of the Goodwood National, Richards insisted on his coming out to Long Island for the night.

Sam was relaxed and cheered by the drive, in the Hispano-Suiza which Richards' daughter, Sheila, had invited her father to buy the moment she had
read the novels of Michael Arlen. They slipped through the vicious traffic of the Grand Central district, turned up First Avenue with its air of
a factory village, crossed the superb arch of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, from which they looked down to towers looming over docks for
steamers from Rio de Janeiro and Barbados and Africa.

They shot through a huddle of factories and workers' cottages, and fled along a road which followed the shore-line, with a salt breeze whispering
through the open windows of the great car; they came into pleasant suburbs, and turned off on a country lane among real farms. Sam's slightly
battered Americanism rose exultantly as he saw cornfields, pumpkin vines, white farm-houses with piles of poplar stove-wood.

And the talk was good.

Sam had never been such a fool as to assert that virile citizens talked only of bonds and prize-fighting, and that any one who pretended to an
interest in Matisse or the Ca' d' Oro was an effeminate pretender. Only, he had pled with Fran, he himself had as much right to be interested in
bonds and bored by Matisse as a painter had to be interested in Matisse and bored by bonds. Of course bonds had been important enough to Alec
Kynance, that afternoon. Yet Alec's talk had not been good, because the little man could never keep his role of Napoleon of Commerce to himself,
but insisted on treating every one he met as either a Faithful Guardsman whose ear he could tweak, or as a Faithful Field Marshal who was gaping
to receive (from Alec) a new baton.

But Elon Richards talked of consolidations and investments and golf and the more scandalous divorces of bankers with the simplicity and
impersonality of a dairyman discussing cattle-feed. He announced (while the car slipped past the little farms and into a region of great estates)
that the K. L. and Z. would be bankrupt within two months, that there really was something to this company that was going to grow 1,000,000
reindeer in Alaska, that Smith Locomotive Common wouldn't be such a bad buy, and that it was perfectly true that the Antelope Car was going to
announce safety windshield glass as a standard accessory.



The great house at Willow Marsh stood on a bluff looking over marshes to Long Island Sound. They dined on a brick terrace, at a little table with
quivering candles, round it three wicker chairs with Sam, Richards, and his daughter, Sheila. It was Sheila who six months ago had demanded the
Hispano-Suiza, but this summer she was in a socialist stage. Sam was a little annoyed because all through dinner she kept asking why the workers
should not take from Sam and her father all their wealth.

Richards, to Sam's incredulity, encouraged Sheila by teasing her:

"If you can get a really first-class leader, like Lenin, who's strong enough to take the money away from me in the first place and to construct a
practical working state in the second, I shan't worry--just as soon work for him and his gang as for our stockholders. But if you think, my
impudent young daughter, that because a lot of socialist journalists yap that maybe, possibly, some day, the working-class may get educated up to
the point of running industry and therefore I ought to join 'em--well, let 'em MAKE me!"



So for an hour.

After twenty-five years of big industry, Sam Dodsworth still believed, in an unformulated and hazy way, that socialism meant the dividing-up of
wealth, after which the millionaires would get it all back within ten years. He still half believed that all Bolsheviks were Jews who wore bushy
beards, carried bombs, and were hardly to be distinguished from anarchists. He didn't completely believe it, because in his office he had met
suave and beardless Soviet agents who had talked competently about importing Revelation cars. But to take socialism seriously--

It annoyed him.

Why had he ever gone abroad? It had unsettled him. He had been bored in Paris, yet he liked crepes Susette better than flapjacks; he liked
leaning over the bridges of the Seine better than walking on Sixth Avenue; and he couldn't, just now, be very excited about the new fenders for
the Revelation car. How was it that this America, which had been so surely and comfortably in his hand, had slipped away?

And here was the daughter of an Elon Richards, most safely conservative of bankers, contaminated with a lot of European socialism. Was life
really as complicated as all that?



It was simpler when Sheila had left them. The June twilight was tender, and across the mauve ribbon of Long Island Sound unseen villages sprang
to life in soft twinkling. On the cool terrace, after two choked days in New York, Sam relaxed in a wicker chair, shoulders moving with
contentment. Richards' cigars were excellent, his brandy was authentic, and now that Sheila was away, driving her own car off to a dance, his
talk was again reasonable.

But it came again--

"Curious, Richards," Sam pondered aloud. "Since I landed in New York yesterday, I've hated the whole rush and zip of it--till this evening, when
I've had a chance to sit down in the country and feel human. Course it was probably just the hot weather. Only--Do you know, I had a feeling of
leisure in France and in England. I felt there as though people made their jobs work for them; they didn't give up their lives to working for
their jobs. And I felt as though there was such a devil of a lot to learn about the world that we're too busy to learn here."

Richards puffed comfortably; then:

"Did you know I was reared in Europe, Sam?"

"No! Fact?"

"Yes. My father and mother were devoted to Europe. We wandered. I spent fourteen out of the first sixteen years of my life in schools in France
and England and Switzerland, and I went back there every summer while I was in Harvard--except the last vacation, after Junior year. Then my
father had a brain-wave, and sent me out to Oregon to work in a lumber camp. I was crazy about it! I was so sick of pensions and cafes and the
general European attitude that, for an American, you weren't such a bad egg. In Oregon I got beaten up by the lumberjacks three times in seven
days, but at the end of the summer I was ardently invited to stay on as straw boss of the camp. I loved it! And I've gone on loving it ever
since. I know that plenty of French financiers are more elegant and leisurely than your flat-footed friend Alec Kynance, but I get more fun out
of fighting Alec!

"Sam, it's a battle here, the way it is in Russia and China.. And you, Sam, you old grizzly, can never be a contemplative gazelle. You've got to
fight. And think of it! Maybe America will rule the world! Maybe in the end we'll be broken up by Russia. But isn't a world-fight like that
better than sitting around avoiding conversational errors and meditating on the proper evening waistcoats? Life!"

Sam meditated, silently and long.

"Elon," said he, "there was a time when I knew my own mind. I didn't do whatever my latest stenographer suggested. But I've seen too many things,
recently. If Fran were here--my wife--I'd probably be pro-Europe. You make me pro-America."

"Why be pro-anything? Why not dive head-first into whatever battle seems most interesting? You can be sure of this: the result won't mean
anything. My girl, Sheila, informs me that a judicious use of eugenics, Karl Marx, and tennis would turn us all into a bunch of beneficent
Apollos in five generations. God forbid! I have a sneaking suspicion that none of us poor vertebrates want perfection, really! But I mean: You're
one of these kind-hearted, dutiful Americans who feels apologetic and inferior the moment he retires, and who'll spend the rest of his life
trying to satisfy everybody he meets: his 'wife and his mistress--"

"Not yet!"

"Wait!--and his friends. Sam, I'm such an idealist that I'd like to start an Association for the Hanging of All Idealists. For Heaven's sake
decide whether you, your own self, are happier in America or in Europe, and then stick there! Me, I'm glad to have European bankers coming to me
begging for loans instead of my going to European cafes and begging waiters for a table in the sun! Sam, this American adventure--Because it is
an adventure that we have here--the greatest in the world--and not a certainty of manners in an uncertainty of the future, like all of Europe.
And say, do you know, our adventure is going to be the bigger because we DO feel that Europe has a lot we need. We're no longer satisfied with
the log cabin and the corn pone. We want everything that Europe has. We'll take it!"

"Um," said Sam.

That night he slept child-like, in a breeze from the Sound. He awoke at five, to sit on the edge of his bed, bulky in his rather touseled silk
pajamas, meditating while he looked down on the marshlands smoking with morning, and the Sound, like whirls of cobweb over bright steel.

If he were fifty miles farther out on Long Island, perhaps he could see across to the Connecticut shore and New Haven.

He realized that this was grotesquely like a day in spring of his senior year in Yale when from East Rock he had looked across the Sound to Long
Island, and in that distant shore beheld romantic harbors. He was separated from the boy who had sat on East Rock only by Long Island Sound, and
thirty years, and that boy's certainty that he would "do something worth while." Today he could think of things far more interesting to attempt
than in those solemn important days when he had been a football star weighed down with the monastic duties of an athlete. It was not, now,
ridiculous to consider being a wanderer in Japan, a proponent of Sheila Richards' socialism or its crusading foe, or, twenty years hence, merely
an old man with a pipe, content among apple trees on a hill above the Ohio River. But also it was obvious now that he was chained by people and
strengths and weaknesses which he had not recognized in his young hour of vision on East Rock.

He could not return to a completely simple and secure life in America because of Fran's dislike for it, and without the habitual titillation of
Fran's gaieties and bad temper, life was inconceivable. He could not become an elegantly lounging cosmopolitan because--his thought stumbled and
growled--oh, because he was Sam Dodsworth!

He was chained by every friend who had made life agreeable--bound not to shock or lose them. He was chained by every dollar he had made, every
automobile he had manufactured--they meant a duty to his caste. He was chained by every hour he had worked--they had left him stiff, spiritually
rheumatic.

He still wanted the world . . . but there was nothing specific in the world that he wanted so much as, thirty years ago, he had wanted to be a
Richard Harding Davis hero.

Then it came to him.

He marveled, "No, the trouble is that, aside from keeping in with Fran and the children and a few friends, I don't want anything enough to fight
for it much. I've done about all I ever imagined--got position, made money, met interesting folks. I'd be a lot luckier if I were a hobo that
hadn't done any of the things he wanted to. Oh, hang it, I don't much care. Maybe I didn't hitch my wagon to a high-enough star! This one don't
look very good!

"Rats! When I get out of this crazy New York district and meet real, simple, hearty fellows back in Zenith--yes, sure, and at my re-union--I'll
get over this grouch.

"But what's it all about, this business of life?

"I'd give my left leg if I could believe what the preachers say. Immortality. Serving Jehovah. But I can't. Got to face it alone--

"Oh, for God's sake, quit pitying yourself! You're as bad as Fran--

"Fran! She's never bad. Not really. Did I ever happen to remember to tell you that I adore you, Fran?"

Four hours later, at breakfast, he was an unsentimental Captain of Finance, attentive only to waffles.



He stood at a gate in the Grand Central Station watching his son lope up the inclined cement runway from the New Haven train.

"If there's anything finer than him at Oxford or in France--" he gloated, and "More Fran's boy than mine, though; got her good looks and
quickness."

Brent was like a young race horse, his pale face and high thin forehead almost too bred-down, too refined. But there was health and buoyancy in
his humorous eyes, his shout of "Hello, Dad! Swell to see you again. Good crossing?"

"Yes. Fair. Nice to see you, boy. How long can you stay?"

"Have to be back in the morning. Catch the milk-train."

"Too bad. Here, give your bag to a red-cap."

"And pay a quarter? Not a chance--not with corn whisky costing what it does."

"Um. I wouldn't drink much of that. But I guess you know that. Where'd you like to dine tonight? Ritz, or some hell-raising place?"

"I'll show you a real joint with real German beer."

"Fine. Uh--"

Sam looked shyly down at the shy boy, and blurted, "Mighty proud of you for making both Bones and Phi Beta Kappa."

"Oh, thanks. Gosh, you're looking fine, sir."

He found that though Brent would be in New York for only twelve hours, he had brought dinner clothes.

"Fran's boy, all right," he reflected, and somehow he was a bit lonely. He wished that he could give this nervous youngster something more than
an allowance--some strength, some stability.

While they dressed, Brent recovered from his filial shyness enough to chatter about the miracles performed by Chick Budlong as a pole-vaulter,
about the astounding fact that after being a perfectly good egg for over two years, Ogden Rose had turned literary and heeled the Lit., about the
"bum body job" of the new U.A.C. Revelation. He was emerging as the young elegant, slim in dinner clothes, and he belonged to a world which would
resent Sam's intrusion, which desired no strength nor stability . . . even if, Sam considered, he had any to give.



The "German restaurant" to which Brent led him was altogether imitation: beer mugs made in Pennsylvania; beams stained to look old; colored glass
windows which, if they could have been opened, would have been found to look on nothing but a plaster wall; and beer that was most deplorably and
waterily imitation.

Against this soiled and tawdry background, against the soiled and insolent and rather pathetic Polish waiters, Brent was real as a knife-blade,
and as shining.

Sam had had a notion that now, two men together, his son and he could be intimately frank. He would talk to Brent about drinking, gambling, the
value of money as a means and its worthlessness as an end, and most of all, about women. Oh, he wouldn't snoop and paw--he'd just give his own
notions of a life neither Puritanical nor licentious; be awfully frank about the danger of the daughters of the street, while admitting, like a
man of the world, the compulsion of "sex"; and if Brent should be moved to give any confidences, he would treat them casually, sympathetically--

That warm rejoicing idea had been chilled the moment he saw Brent's self-confident figure. Why, the boy might think he was in Bad Taste, and next
to the affection of Fran and Emily, he wanted Brent's affection and respect more than that of any one in the world. So, in parental fear, while
he would have liked to expose his soul, he droned about Lord Herndon, Gioserro the aviator, the palace at Versailles--

But there was one intimate thing of which he could talk:

"Son, have you decided whether you'll go to Harvard Law School when you finish Yale?"

"I haven't quite decided, sir."

"Don't call me 'sir'! Look here, Brent; I have a notion--If your Mother and I are still abroad when you graduate, how would it be for you to come
and join us for a year or so? Maybe between us, we could get her to chase off to Africa and India and China and so on. Just now she's stuck on
Paris. I've been finding out there's a devil of a lot to see in this world. There's no hurry about your getting down to earning money."

"But you went to work early, sir."

"Don't call me 'sir'--I'm still under the age for it--I hope! And I think that maybe I got to work too early. Rather wish, now, I'd bummed around
the world a little first. And after all these years you've been studying, to go right on to your law books--"

"Well, you see, sir, I'm not sure I'll go out for law."

"Um. What you thinking of? Medicine? Motors?"

"No, I--You know my roommate, Billy Deacon, his dad is president of Deacon, Iffley and Watts, the bond-house; and Billy wants me to come in with
him selling bonds. I think probably I could be making twenty-five thousand a year in ten years, and in the law, if I went into a really tophole
New York firm, I'd only be a clerk then. And some day I'll be in the hundred and fifty thousand a year class."

Brent said it with the modest confidence, the eager eyes, of a young poet announcing that he was going to write an epic.

Sam spoke doubtfully:

"May sound like a funny thing from a man that's always captured every dollar he could lay his hands on, but--Brent, I've always wanted to build
things; to leave something besides a bank balance. Afraid you wouldn't be doing that, just selling bonds. Not that I've anything against bonds,
you understand! Nice handsome engravings. But are you going to need to make money so fast--"

"Life's a lot more expensive than when you started, Dad. Fellow has to have so many things. When I was a kid, a man with a limousine was a little
tin god, but now a fellow that hasn't got a yacht simply isn't in it. If a fellow makes his pile, then he can lay off and have a hobby--see
Europe and go out for public spirit and all that stuff. I believe I've got a swell chance with Bill Deacon and his bunch."

"Well. Course you've got to decide for yourself. But I wish you'd think it over--about really building things."

"Sure. I certainly will, sir."



Brent was bright with compliments about Sam's knowledge of Europe; he remarked that Sam's football glories were still remembered at Yale.

And Sam sighed to himself that he had lost the boy forever.



CHAPTER 18


Sam was packing, to go to New Haven for his thirtieth class reunion, when the mild little knock came at the door. He roared "Come in," and at
first did not look to see who his visitor might be. The silence after the opening of the door made him turn.

Tub Pearson was on the threshold, grinning.

"Well, you fat little runt!" said Sam, which meant, "My dear old friend, I am enchanted to see you!" And Tub gave answer, "You big stiff, so they
couldn't stand you in Yurrup any more, eh? So you had to sneak back here, eh? You big bum!" Which signified, to one knowing the American
language, "I have been quite distressingly lonely for you in Zenith, and had you not returned, I should probably have given up the Reunion and
gone to Europe to see you--I would, really."

"Well, you're looking fine, Tub." And they patted each other's arms, curtly.

"So are you. You look ausgezeichnet. I guess Europe agreed with you. Didn't bring me home a little of that swell French wine, did you?"

"Sure, I've got a whole case of it in my collar box."

"Well, bring it out. Let's not put off the fatal hour."

From behind a trunk (where, under the new American dispensation, all hotel guests hide the current bottle of whisky, to make it easier for the
hotel servants to find it) Sam produced something, chuckling, "Now this may just look like plain Methodist bootlegged corn to you, Tub, but
remember you ain't traveled expensively and got educated, the way I have. Say when. . . . Oh, say, Tub, I got a bottle of the real thing--pre-war
Scotch--taken off me here at the docks."

"Oh, my God! What a sacrilege! Well now, tell me, what kind of a time d'you really have?"

"Oh, fine, fine! Paris is a fine city. Say, how's Matey and your kids?"

"Fine!"

"How's Harry Hazzard?"

"He's fine. He's got a grand-daughter. Say, they whoop it up all night long in Paris, don't they?"

"Yeh, pretty late. Have you seen Emily lately?"

"Just the other day at the country club. Looked fine. Oh, say, Sambo, can you explain one thing to me? Is there any chance the Bolsheviks will
pay the Czarist debts to France? And what kind of a buy are French municipals?"

"Well, I didn't find out much about--Oh, I met some high-class Frogs--fellow named Andillet, stock-broker, pretty well heeled I guess. But it
isn't like with us. Hard to get those fellows down to real serious talk, out of the office. They want to gas about the theater and dancing and
horse-racing all the time. But say, I did learn one mighty interesting thing: the Citroen people in France and the Opel people in Germany are
putting up low-priced cars that'll give the Ford and the Chev a mighty hard run for their money in European territory and--Oh! Say! Tub! Can you
tell me anything about the rumors that Ford is going to scrap Model T and come out with an entirely new model? My God, I've tried and tried and I
can't find out anything about it! I've asked Alec Kynance, and I've asked Byron Rogers of the Sherman, and I've asked Elon Richards, and if they
know anything, they won't let it out and--By golly, I'd like to find out something about it."

"So would I! So would I! And I can't find out a thing!"

They both sighed, and refilled.

"They finished the new addition to the country club?" asked Sam.

"Yes, and it's a beauty. They play much golf in France?"

"I guess so, on the Riviera. Been by my house recently? Everything look all right?"

"You bet. I stopped and spoke to your caretaker. Seems like a good reliable fellow. Say, just what does a fellow DO, evenings in Paris? What kind
of hang-outs do you go to? 'Bout like night-clubs here?"

"Well, a lot better wine--well no, at that, some of the places that are filled with Americans stick you and stick you good for pretty poor fizz.
But on the whole--Oh, I don't know; you get tired of racketing around. All these pretty women, talking all the time!"

"Didn't pick up a little cutie on the side, did you?"

"Did you say 'cutie' or 'cootie'?"

And they both laughed, and they both sighed, and of Sam's non-existent amorous affairs they said no more.

And they found that they had nothing else to say.



For years they had shared friends, games, secret business-reports. They had been able to talk actively about the man they had seen the day
before, the poker they had played two days ago, the bank scandal that was going on at the moment. But in six months, most of the citizens of
Zenith whose scandals and golf handicaps had been important had been dimmed for Sam; he could not visualize them, could think of nothing to ask
about them. The two men fell into an uncomfortable playing at catch with questions and answers.

Sam said, mildly, "Kind of wish I'd started going abroad earlier, Tub--kind of interesting to see how differently they do things. But it's too
late now."

He struggled to make clear what had interested him in England and France--the tiny, unchartable differences of dress, of breakfast bacon, of
political parties, of vegetables in market places, of the ministers of God--but Tub was impatient. What he wanted was a gloating vicarious
excursion into blazing restaurants full of seductive girls, marvelous food, wine unimaginably good at fifty cents a bottle, superb drunks without
a headache, and endless dancing without short breath. Sam tried to oblige but--

"Funny!" He couldn't somehow picture the dancing rendezvous he had seen only a fortnight ago. He could see the musty cupboard where the patient
chambermaid of their hotel floor had sat waiting, apparently all day and all night, knitting, smelling of herring and poverty; but of the Jardin
de Ma Soeur he could see nothing but tables, smooth floor, and the too darkly enraptured eyes of Gioserro the aviator, dancing with Fran.

Sam dropped so low conversationally that he asked about the well-being of the Rev. Dr. Willis Fortune Tate of Zenith.

Then Ross Ireland banged in.

"Off to Mexico to do a story on oil, gimme a drink," he said, and all was liveliness again.

Sam was distressed that he should be relieved to have his confidences with his oldest friend interrupted by this half-stranger, but he was
pleased when Tub Pearson took to him. Half an hour later, when Ross had told his celebrated story of Doc Pilvins the veterinarian and the plush
horse, the three of them went out to dinner, had cocktails, and became lively and content.

Only once in an evening of different night clubs, none of which were different, did Sam worry again:

"Good Lord, are all of us here in America getting so we can't be happy, can't talk, till we've had a lot of cocktails? What's the matter with our
lives?"

But on the Yale campus next afternoon, with Tub, he was roaring with delight to see again the comrades of old days; the beloved classmates who
stayed so unshakably in his mind that he had forgotten nothing about them save their professions, their present dwelling-places, and their names.



The 1896 division of the procession to the baseball game at Yale Field, in their blue coats and white trousers, was led by Tub Pearson, shaking a
rattle and singing:


Good morning, Mr. Zip, Zip, Zip, Got a hair-cut as short as mine? Good morning, Mr. Zip, Zip, Zip, I cer'n'ly am feeling fine. Ashes to ashes and
dust to dust, If the army don't get you then the navy must--


Sam was moved to sadness and prayer by the sight of his classmates. It was one of the astonishments of the reunion how old many of them had
become at fifty or fifty-two--Don Binder, for instance, in college a serious drinker, baby-faced and milky, now an Episcopalian rector who looked
as though he were sixty-five and as though he carried the sins of the country on his stooped shoulders. The spectacle made Sam himself feel
ancient. But as startling were the classmates who at fifty looked thirty-five, and who irritated a man like Sam, amiable about exercise but no
fanatic, by shouting that everybody ought to play eighteen holes of golf a day.

But however sheepish Sam might feel, Tub was radiant, was again the class clown during the procession. He danced across the road from side to
side, shaking his rattle, piping on a penny whistle, frightening a child on the sidewalk almost into epilepsy by kneeling down and trying to be
chummy.

"He's fine. He's funny," Sam assured himself. "He's a great goat. Hell, he's an idiot! WHY am I getting to be such a grouch on life? Better go
back to the desk."



But whatever discomfort he had at playing the hobbledehoy, in the class reunion Sam found balm. They knew who he was! No one in Paris (except
Fran, at times) knew that. But his classmates realized that he was Sambo Dodsworth, great tackle, Skull and Bones, creative engineer, president
of a corporation, "prince of good fellows."

Except for a few professional alumni who at fifty could still tell what was the score in last year's Yale-Brown game, who at fifty had nothing
with which to impress the world except the fact that they were Yale Men, the class had drifted far from the cheery loafing and simple-hearted
idealism of college days. They were bank presidents and college presidents and surgeons and country school-teachers and diplomats; they were
ranchmen and congressmen and ex-convicts and bishops. One was a major general, and one--in college the most mouse-like of bookworms--was the
funniest comedian on Broadway. They were fathers and grandfathers, and most of them looked as though they overworked or overdrank. Not one of
them had found life quite the amusing and triumphant adventure he had expected; and they came back wistfully, longing to recapture their
credulous golden days. They believed (for a week) that their classmates were peculiarly set apart from the crooked and exasperating race of men
as a whole.

And all of this Sam Dodsworth believed--for a week.

It was pleasant, on a clam bake at Momauguin, to loll in the sand with the general, a college president, and two steel kings, as though they were
all of them nineteen again, to be hailed as "Old Sambo," to wrestle without thinking of dignity, and for a moment to be so sentimental as to
admit that they longed for something greater than their surface successes. It was pleasant, in the rooms to which they were assigned in Harkness,
to forget responsibilities as householders and company managers, and to loll puppy-like on window-seats, beside windows fanned by the elms,
telling fabulous lies till one, till two of the morning, without thinking of being up early and on the job. It was pleasant at dinner in a
private room to sing "Way Down on the Bingo Farm" and to come out with a long, clinging, lugubrious yowl in:


Here's to good old Yaaaaaaaaaaaale She's so hearty and so hale--


Even the men who on the first day he had not been able to remember became clear. Why yes! That was old Mark Derby--always used to be so funny the
way he played on a comb and never could remember his necktie.

He was nineteen again; in a world which had seemed barren of companionship he had found two hundred brothers; and he was home, he rejoiced--to
stay!

So, with Tub Pearson, he rode westward from New York to Zenith, gratified as the thunderous slots of Manhattan streets gave way to the glowing
Hudson, to tranquil orchards and old white houses and resolute hills.



The breakfast-room of Harry McKee, Sam's new son-in-law, was a cheery apartment with white walls, canary-yellow curtains at the French windows,
and a parrot, not too articulate, in a red enamel cage. The breakfast set was of taffy-like peasant faience from Normandy, and the electrical
toaster and percolator on the table were of nickel which flashed in the lively Midwestern morning sunshine.

Sam was exultant. He had arrived late last evening, and as his own house was musty from disuse, he had come to Emily's. He had slept with a
feeling of security, and this morning he was exhilarated at being again with her, his own Emily, gayest and sturdiest of girls. He had brought
his presents for them down to breakfast--the Dunhill pipe and the Charvet dressing-gown for Harry, the gold and tortoiseshell dressing-table set
and the Guerlain perfumes for Emily. They admired the gifts, they patted him in thanks, they fussed over his having real American porridge with
real cream. In a blissful assurance of having come home forever to his own snug isle, after decades amid white-fanged seas, of having brought to
his astounded tribe incredible tales of Troy and Circe and men with two heads, he began to expatiate on Paris, smiling at them, reaching out to
take Emily's hand, launching into long-winded details.

"--now what I never understood about Paris," he was rumbling, "is how much of it is like a series of villages, with narrow streets and little
bits of shops that don't hardly keep the proprietor busy. You always hear of the big boulevards and the wild dance halls, but what struck me was
the simple little places--"

"Yes, that was so even in the war, when I was in Paris," said McKee. "But there must be a lot of difference since then. Say, Dad, I'm afraid I
have to hustle to the office. Hope to sell a few million bolts to the Axton Car people today. But I want to hear all about Paris. Be home by six-
thirty. Awful' good to have you back, sir. Good-bye, Emily of Emilies!"

After the kisses and flurry and engine-racings of McKee's departure, Emily beamed her way back and caroled, "Oh, don't eat that cold toast! I'll
make you a nice fresh slab. You must try this lovely apricot jam. Now go on and tell me some more about Paris. Oh, it's perfectly ducky to be
with you again! Harry is NEXT to the nicest man living but you're the--Oh, you MUST eat some more. Now tell me about Paris."

"Well," mildly, "I really haven't much to tell. It's hard to express how you feel about a foreign place. Something kind of different in the air.
I'm afraid I'm not much on analyzing a thing like that. . . . Emily, uh--Harry doing pretty well financially?"

"Oh, splendidly! They've raised him another five thousand a year."

"You don't need a little check for yourself?"

"Oh, not a thing. Thanks, old darling. Drat him, Harry carried off the Advocate and I know you want to read it."

Sam did not hear her reference to the Advocate. Flushed, he was reflecting, "Am I trying to pay my daughter to be interested in me? Trying to buy
her affection?" He scuttled away from the thought, into a hasty description of Les Halles at dawn, as he had seen them when the De Penable
menagerie, with himself as an attendant keeper, had had an all-night round of cafes. He had begun to care for his own narration; he was saying,
"Well, I'd never tried white wine and onion soup for breakfast, but I was willing to try anything once," when the telephone began.

"Excuse me a second, Daddy," said Emily, and for five minutes she held a lively conversation with one Mona about a tennis tournament, knitted
suits, Dick, speed boats, lobster salad, Mrs. Logan, and a Next Thursday mentioned with such italicized awe that Sam felt ignorant in not knowing
how it might differ from any other Thursday. He realized, too, that he did not know who Mona, Dick, or Mrs. Logan were.

The importance of having eaten onion soup for breakfast had cooled by the time Emily whisked back to the table. Before Sam had warmed up and
begun the story of Captain Gioserro's hiring a vegetable wagon to drive to the hotel, the sneering telephone called Emily again, and for three
minutes she dealt with a tradesman who had apparently been sending bad meat. She dealt with him competently. She seemed to know everything about
cuts of steak, the age of ducklings, and the trimming of a crown roast.

She was not his rollicking helpless girl. She was a Competent Young Matron.

"She doesn't need me any more," sighed Sam.



The Dodsworths had not rented their house but had left it tenantless, save for a caretaker who maintained a creeping ashen existence in a corner
of the basement, spelling out old newspapers from garbage cans all day long. The caretaker, when he had admitted Sam after five minutes of
ringing, wanted to show him through the house, but Sam said abruptly, "I'll go by myself, thanks."

The hall was dim as a tomb and as airless. His foot-fall on the carpetless floor was so loud that he began to tip-toe. There were presences which
threatened him as an intruder in his own house. He stood in the door of the library. The room, once warm and tranquil, was bleakly unwelcoming.
It was a dead room in a dead house. The rugs were rolled up, piled in a corner, their exposed under-sides drab and pebbly. The book-shelves were
covered with sheets, and the deep chairs, swathed in gray covers, were as shapeless and distasteful as the wrapper of a slovenly housewife. The
fireplace had a stingy cleanness. But in a corner of it clung a scrap of paper with Fran's hectic writing. He stooped slowly to pick it up, and
made out the words "--call motor at ten and--" She seemed to dash into the room and flee away, leaving him the lonelier.

He climbed heavily up the stairway, steps clattering flatly, and shouldered into their bedroom. He looked about, silent.

The canopies of their two beds had been taken down, leaving the posts like bare masts; and the surfaces of those once suave and endearing
retreats were mounds of pillows and folded blankets covered with coarse sheets.

He went to the drawn window blinds.

"Blinds getting cracked. Need new ones," he said aloud.

He looked about again, and shivered. He went to the bed in which Fran had always slept, and stood staring at it. He patted the edge of the bed
and quickly marched out of the room--out of the house.



Brent was to have returned to Zenith for a fortnight, and Sam had a hundred plans for motoring with him, fishing with him. But Brent telegraphed,
"Invited corking yachting party Nova Scotia mind if not return," and Sam, perfectly expressionless, wrote his answer, "By all means go hope have
splendid time." As he walked out of the Western Union office he sighed a little, and stood with his hands in his pockets, looking up and down the
street, a man with nothing to do.



He had thought of himself, when he had been the president of the Revelation Company, as a young man at fifty. To him, then, old age did not begin
till seventy, perhaps seventy-five, and he would have another quarter-century of energy. But the completeness with which Emily, at twenty-one,
had matured, become competent to run her own life, made Sam feel that he belonged to an unwanted generation; that, amazingly, he was old.

It was the afternoon of Elizabeth Jane's party which made Sam so conscious that he was a stranger, unable to mix with this brisk, luxurious Young
Married Set, that he politely fled from Emily's house and holed-in at the Tonawanda Country Club.

Elizabeth Jane was Harry McKee's eleven-year-old niece. Like a surprising number of other successful youngish men of Zenith, hard-surfaced,
glossy, ferociously driving in business, and outside of business absorbed only in sports and cocktail-lit dancing, McKee was fanatically
interested in children. He was on the Zenith school-board and the Board of Visitors of St. Mark's Town and Country School. Emily and Harry McKee
made Sam blush by the cheery openness with which they informed him that they intended to have only three children, but to have those with
celerity and to have them perfect. (They apparently possessed more control of Providence than was understood by such an innocent as Sam.) While
they awaited the arrival of the three, they were devoted to Elizabeth Jane, a sedate, bob-haired, bookish child, who reminded Sam of a boy
minstrel in a Maxfield Parrish picture. (He had always admired Parrish's dream castles, despite Fran's scoffing.)

Sam liked Elizabeth Jane. "Real old-fashioned child," he said. "So innocent and demure."

And the next day Elizabeth Jane remarked placidly, when she had invited herself to tea with Sam and Emily, "Aunty, would it be awfully rude of me
if I said my teacher is a damn' fool? Would it? She's started telling us about sex, and she's so scared and silly about it, and of course all of
us kids know all about it already."

"My God!" said Samuel Dodsworth to himself.

McKee and Emily celebrated Elizabeth Jane's twelfth birthday with an afternoon party for forty children. Sam knew that there were to be many
dodges of a rich nature; he was aware that a red and white striped pavilion was being erected on the McKee lawn, and orders in for such simple
delights as Peche Melba, Biscuit Tortoni, and Bombe Surprise, along with Viennese pastry, loganberry juice, imported ginger ale and lobster
salad, and that the caterer was sending half a dozen waiters in dress suits. But he was still antiquated enough to picture the children playing
Ring Around a Rosy, and Puss in the Corner, and Hide 'n' Go Seek.

He was lunching with Tub Pearson on the day of the party, and after lunch he excitedly went to the five and ten cent store and filled his pockets
with dozens of pleasant little foolishnesses--false noses, chocolate cigars, tissue-paper hats--and proceeded to McKee's, planning to set all the
children at the party laughing with his gifts.

He was late. When he arrived the children were decorously sitting in four rows of chairs on the lawn, watching a professional troupe from the
Zenith Stock Company perform an act from "Midsummer Night's Dream." And there was a professional magician afterward--though the young lordlings
were bored by such kitchy banalities as rabbits out of silk hats--and a lady teacher from the Montessori School, who with a trained voice-for-
children and trained gestures told ever such nice Folk Tales from Czechoslovakia, Serbia, Iceland, and Yucatan. Then, unherded but politely in
order, the children filed past a counter at which Harry McKee, disguised as an Arab for no perceptible reason, gave each of them a present.

They each said, "Thank you very much," tolerantly, and unwrapped their presents, showing their trained social-mindedness by depositing the
wrappers in a barrel therefor provided. Sam goggled at the presents. There were French perfume and packets of a thousand stamps, riding crops and
portable phonographs, engraved stationery and a pair of love-birds.

He hastily pulled out the flaps of his coat pockets lest some one see the ludicrous little gifts he had bought.

And later, "I've got to get out of this. Too rich for my blood."

It took a week of tactful hinting about needing eight hours of daily golf, but in the end he escaped to one of the chintzy bedrooms at the
Tonawanda Country Club and there, in an atmosphere of golf, gin-bottles in the locker room, small dinners followed by poker, and a reading-room
full of magazines which on glossy paper portrayed country houses and polo teams, he made out a lotus-eating existence, with cold cauliflower and
stringy lamb-chops and bootlegged whisky for lotuses.

He persuaded himself, for minutes at a time, that business affairs demanded his staying in Zenith, and he bleakly knew, for hours at a time, that
they didn't.

His capital was invested in carefully diversified ventures--in U.A.C. stock, railroad and industrial and government bonds. However often he
conferred with his bankers and brokers, he couldn't find anything very absorbing to do in the way of changing investments.

But he also owned, as a more speculative interest, a share of a resort hotel near Zenith, and on his way to America he had persuaded himself
that, with his newly educated knowledge of food and decoration and service, he would be able to improve this hotel.

It was quite a bad hotel, and very profitable.

He had a meal there, two days after arriving in Zenith, and it was terrible.

He told the manager that it was terrible.

The manager looked bored and resigned.

When Sam had persuaded him to stay, the manager explained that with the cost of materials and the salaries of cooks, he couldn't do a better meal
at the price. It was all very well, the manager pointed out, to talk about the food in Paris. Only, this wasn't Paris. And furthermore, did Sam
happen to know what chickens cost per pound at the present moment?

That was Sam's only achievement during his stay in Zenith. But weeks went by before he admitted, rather angrily, that business did not need him .
. . just as Brent did not need him, Emily did not need him.

But certainly, he comforted himself, Fran needed him, and such friends as Tub Pearson.

Read Part Two of Dodsworth