'Oh,' said Mrs. Frank. 'Not one of your papers, pater? Can't be, if it's obscure, can it?'
'No, not one of my papers. A periodical called, I believe, the Weekly
Comment, with which you may or may not be familiar.'
'Never heard of it, I'm afraid,' Mrs. Frank confessed, truly. 'Why don't you go on to one of the family concerns, Johnny? You'd get on much quicker there, with pater to shove you.'
'Probably,' Johnny agreed.
'My papers,' said Mr. Potter dryly, 'are not quite up to Johnny's intellectual level. Nor Jane's. Neither do they accord with their political sympathies.'
'Oh, I forgot you two were silly old Socialists. Never mind, that'll pass when they grow up, won't it, Frank?'
Secretly, Mrs. Frank thought that the twins had the disease because the
Potter family, however respectable now, wasn't really 'top-drawer.'
Funny old pater had, every one knew, begun his career as a reporter on a provincial paper. If funny old pater had been just a shade less clever or enterprising, his family would have been educated at grammar schools and gone into business in their teens. Of course, Mrs. Potter had pulled the social level up a bit; but what, if you came to that, had Mrs. Potter been? Only the daughter of a country doctor; only the underpaid secretary of a lady novelist, for all she was so conceited now.
So naturally Socialism, that disease of the underbred, had taken hold of the less careful of the Potter young.
'And are you going to write for this weekly what-d'you-call-it too,
Jane?' Mrs. Frank inquired.