“Dad’s more in love with you than I am! He thinks you’re the brightest star in the movie zodiac.”
“We just mustn’t overdo it, Bunny! Your conscience will get to troubling you, and you’ll blame it on me.”
“Dog-gone-it, Vee, you boss me worse than if we were Annabelle and Roscoe.”
“Well, let me tell you, if I manage to keep my oil prince as long as Annabelle has kept hers, I’ll count myself a lucky woman!”
VII
Gregor Nikolaieff was back from his trip to Alaska, with more troubles for the conscience of a young idealist. Gregor was gaunt and hollow-eyed, like Paul returned from Siberia. Poor unsuspecting foreign youth—he had shipped on what the sailors call “the hell fleet of the Pacific,” and had found himself trapped in a desolate bay, walled in by mountains on one side and ocean on the other, housed in barracks whose floors were wet by the tides, sleeping in vermin-ridden bunks, and eating food like that fed to the inmates of county jails. No way of escape, save on ships that would not take you! While Bunny had been romping in the Pacific with Vee and the seals, Gregor had been near to drowning himself in the same ocean.
Also Rachel Menzies had come home, with more troubles; there was a strike of the clothing workers! Quite unforeseen and spontaneous—hundreds of workers, driven beyond endurance by petty oppressions, had walked out in the middle of a job; the movement had spread all over this Angel City, paradise of the “open shop.” The workers were crowding into the union offices and signing up, and a regular mass-struggle was under way. But Papa Menzies, one of the intellectuals among the strikers, a man of force and insight—Papa Menzies was sitting at home, with his frantic Hebrew wife clinging to his coat-tails and wailing that if he went out and took part in the strike, the police would get him and ship him off to Poland to be shot, and never to see his family again!
As a result of this strike, Rachel was not going to be able to come to college. Bunny, elegant young gentleman of leisure, who had never known what it was to need money in his life, could not understand this, and had to be told in plain words that Rachel’s family had been making sacrifices to get her an education, and all these plans were knocked out. Then of course Bunny wanted to get Dad to help; what was the use of having a rich father, if you couldn’t serve your friends in a pinch? But Rachel answered no, they had always been independent, and she would not think of such a thing; she would have to skip a term in the university.
“But then you won’t be in my class!” exclaimed Bunny—realizing suddenly how much he needed an antitoxin for the dullness of Southern Pacific culture!
“It’s very kind of you, Mr. Ross,” she answered, sedately. “But perhaps you will come to the meetings of the Socialist local.”