Well then we talked about what the Spokesman had said about freedom of trade and of speech and Mr. Edgerton says that one of them Bolshiviki fellers has just sent the Spokesman a telegram saying that since He has come to believe in free speech wont He please let out some of the fellers that is in jail for practicing it. So there it is you see just like I said to Hotaire, how dangerous them fellers is. I says something that Pop had wrote me, “Liberty dont mean license.” But Mr. Edgerton says that is an old one too it seems that all Pop’s ideas is old.
So I says right out of my own ideas I says, “Well I’ll say this that if a government aint got the right to protect itself, then what is it for?” And Mr. Edgerton went up into the air again and he says that is one of the proofs that I have got a mind just like the Spokesman, I would sure see that in His answer to the Bolshiviki feller only of course He wont answer the feller.
Well there we was chatting away as happy as you please and having such a good dinner too when all of a sudden I notices there is a feller sitting at the next table all by himself and he dont seem to have a thing to do but listen to what we are saying. I gets him out of the corner of my eye and then I writes a note on the menu and shoves it over to Mr. Edgerton, “We are being listened to.” So then he begins to talk about the unusual severe winter we have been having and by and by he gets a chance to look at the other feller who is attending to what is in his own plate real hard. And after that we dont talk no more international affairs.
Well when we get up to go we have hardly got out of the door before I see the other feller getting up and when we are walking down the street there he is following us. So we stop to look in a shop-window and I see him stop too and I says to Mr. Edgerton, “We are being shadowed. I must get on a street-car right quick and you get on another going the other way and we will see what happens.”
So we shook hands and I run and caught a car going my way home and that is all I know about it for I didnt see the feller on my car. But oh Mom do you suppose that Mr. Edgerton’s wife can of heard how he is taking out a manicurist to dinner? Or do you suppose it can be some of them Bolshivikis that is trying to undermine the government by keeping me from helping the Spokesman keep close to the great heart of the plain people?
Your scared
Mame.
LETTER VIII
IN WHICH I PEEK INTO A PALACE
Dear Mom: