“He’s right,” her father chimed in. “This is not a temporary difference of opinion, you know, Crystal. This cleavage is as old as mankind—the radical against the conservative. Time doesn’t reconcile them.”
Again the idea came to her: “They do love to form gangs, the poor dears.” Aloud she said: “Yes, but the two types are rarely pure ones. Why, father, you think Ben is a radical, but he’s the most hidebound conservative about some things—much worse than you—about free verse, for instance. I read a long editorial about it not a month ago. He really thinks anyone who defends it ought to be deported to some poetic limbo. Ben, you think my father is conservative. But there’s a great scandal in his mental life. He’s a Baconian—”
“He thinks Bacon wrote the plays!” exclaimed Ben, really shocked.
“Certainly I do,” answered Mr. Cord. “Every man who uses his mind must think so. There is nothing in favor of the Shakespeare theory, except tradition—”
He would have talked for several hours upon the subject, but Crystal interrupted him by turning to Ben and continuing what she had meant to say:
“When you said I should have to choose between your ideas, you meant between your political ideas. Perhaps I shall, but I won’t make my choice, rest assured, until I have some reason for believing that each of you knows something—honestly knows something about the other one’s point of view.”
“I don’t get it, exactly,” said Ben.
She addressed Mr. Cord.
“Father,” she went on, “Ben has a little flat in Charles Street, and an old servant, and that’s where I’m going to live.”
Her father, though bitterly wounded, had regained his sardonic calm. “Perhaps,” he said, “you’ll bring him up to Seventy-ninth Street for Sunday dinner now and then.”