Miss Loeffler laughed girlishly. “That was stupid of me,” she admitted. “And you were quite the calmest thing I’ve ever seen. But truly,” she went on earnestly, keeping the car, however, at a discreet twelve miles an hour, “it’s serious. You’d be surprised to know how much is stirring deep, deep down right here in Vernon, that you’d think was a positive stronghold of capitalism. Come with me now, will you?” she said eagerly, “and let me show you?”
“Show me what?”
“People who are really thinking, people who get together and see things straight—the social revolution, Bolshevism.”
“Dear me!” said Stacey. “I knew Vernon was no longer provincial, but I had no idea it was so metropolitan as all that.”
“Oh, you can laugh!” she returned darkly, “but you’ll see. Of course you understand we trust your discretion.”
“Of course.”
She turned off from the avenue and stopped the car before an office building. “We meet here,” she announced, “in an ordinary office-room, because it’s so conspicuous that it’s perfectly safe.” And they went up in the elevator.
The large room which they presently entered had been given the semblance of a club. There were numerous easy chairs around the floor, chintz curtains at the windows, and across one end of the room a huge oak table with a vase of flowers and many books and periodicals. Fifteen or twenty people were in the room, some standing, some sprawling in the chairs, two or three perched on the edge of the table. The air was heavy with cigarette smoke.
“Comrade Loeffler!” several voices shouted, as Irene and Stacey entered.
“And with a new comrade in tow!” cried some one.