“Do you really!” I exclaimed, genuinely delighted. “That’s good. Tell me what they are.”
“Well, in religious matters we agree with father as little as with mother. He is always talking about ‘jungle ethics’ and ‘the law of survival.’ He thinks he is the only realist. But that is old stuff, and it doesn’t sound good to us. We don’t fall for the cave-man line of aristocracy that Dreiser and Mencken and Lawrence and those fellows are trying to bring in.”
“Where do you get your line?”
“Oh, out of books and talk and out of the air; some of it we think out ourselves, and a little of it we get from Hoover and Lane and what father calls the ‘Western roughneck crowd.’ Since January, we’re teetotalers; and father, of course, is only a prohibitionist. Then we’re sick of war—we don’t think it’s sensible; and we’re sick of supermen; and we’re sick of belonging to the ‘privileged class.’ We believe in the real square deal and good sportsmanship and common sense and common decency and health and hygiene and science and beauty—and a lot of things like that. Of course, father and mother pretend that they do, too—in a way. But we are radical democrats, I guess; and father and mother are both snobs.”
Dorothy, listening to as much as she could catch from the steering wheel, called back:—
“Father isn’t a snob—mother is.”
“You are wrong, Dolly,” said her brother; “they are both snobs. We are really interested in the People. Neither of them cares two straws for anyone outside their own class—except, of course, that father has a personal friend here and there among the cab-drivers and the police. He thinks that he is being like Roosevelt. And that he’s like Roosevelt when he goes around among the ‘peasantry,’ as he calls them, whooping it up for big families, and patting them on the back for having eighteen little morons, and making it a crime to tell them how to get a chance to live like civilized beings.”
“I’ve heard your father say very sensible things about that. You do him an injustice.”
“No, I don’t. We believe in telling people the truth; and in finding out first what it is. Father believes in making a Federal statute first, to keep the peasantry peasants, and busy propagating mill-hands and soldiers; and then in violating it himself as he sees fit. Father is personally interested in the truth, and he really knows a lot about it; but he wouldn’t dream of telling it to anyone but an intimate friend—he doesn’t think it’s safe. And mother doesn’t think it’s decent. Besides, she hates like sin to admit even to herself the existence of any fact that doesn’t fit into her vision of a ‘nice’ world. She likes to sit on the shore and order the sea back. She really enjoys deceiving herself, and is pretty good at it. Father isn’t like that.”
“So you side with him there?”