Can you imagine my feelings on top of my suspicions of her? You can! I got up and went into the kitchen to see if a bomb was may be being prepared for our dinner, but not at all. The kitchen was scrubbed to the last tile, something that smelled simply grand was baking, the white hyacinths was in the sun on the window-sill, and Anna was humming under her breath while she rolled out biscuit-dough. The radical parrot was shut up, but only as to mouth, he being loose and walking about the top of the clothes-wringer, making himself very much at home, and giving me some evil look as I come in.
"Aren't you afraid he'll get away?" I says.
"Huh?" says Anna, stopping rolling, and blinking at me.
"Lose him—parrot——!" I says, pointing to him and flapping my arms like wings.
"Frits?" she said. "Na—Frits like liberty!"
And that was all I could get out of her. I stuck around for a few minutes more, until Anna commenced to give me the cook's-eye, that bird backing her up and sneering at me while dancing slowly on the wringer, but not moving a step. So I got out and back to the parlor but not to my work which Gawd knows I had to take it over to the bank and leave them do it for me after all—but sat down instead to consider them two suspicious birds in the back part of the flat. I personally myself was convinced that there was something very wrong about Anna. But so far she had said nothing under the espionage law exactly and I didn't know could you arrest a bird for too much liberty of speech even though it loved anarchy, and liberty and everything and was undoubtedly capable of spreading propaganda what with the voice it had.
Well anyways, as I was holding my marcelle wave with both hands and racking what little was underneath it over the situation, I heard the key in the lock and in come Ma all flushed and cheerful and pleased with herself and handed me another jolt.
"I had a real sweet, pleasant morning," she says, taking off her gloves and hat and wiping her face with one of them big handkerchiefs like she used to carry in the circus and will not give up. "A real nice time," she says, egging me on to question her.
"Where have you been?" I says, like she wanted me to.
"Oh, just to a little Bolsheviki meeting," she says, casual. And picking up her things she started for her room.