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more alarm? The French, who had not been consulted, would probably be furious.

The declaration was issued soon after the young couple had returned to Shore Acres, and the

French were furious, but the Germans were not much helped. In the middle of July the great

Danat Bank failed in Berlin, and there was terror such as Lanny had witnessed in New York.

Chancellor Briining went to Paris to beg for help, and Premier Laval refused it; France was

now the strongest European power financially, and was sitting on her heap of gold, lending it

only for the arming of Poland and her other eastern allies —which were blackmailing her without

mercy. Britain had made the mistake of trying to buttress German finances, and now her own

were shaky as a result. "We're not that sort of fools," wrote young Denis de Bruyne to Lanny,

who replied: "If you let the German Republic fall and you get Hitler, will that help you?"

Young Denis did not reply.

Such were the problems faced by the statesmen while two darlings of fortune were having fun all

over the northeastern states. Invitations would come, and they would order their bags packed,

step into their car in the morning, drive several hours or perhaps all day, and step out onto an

estate in Bar Harbor or Newport, the Berkshires or the Ramapo Hills, the Adirondacks or the

Thousand Islands. Wherever it was, there would be a palace—even though it was called a

"cottage" or a "camp." The way you knew a "camp" was that it was built of "slabs," and you

wore sport clothes and didn't dress for dinner; but the meal would be just as elaborate, for

nobody stayed anywhere without sending a staff of servants ahead and having all modern

conveniences, including a dependable bootlegger. Radios and phonographs provided music for

dancing, and if you didn't have the right number for games, you called people on the long-

distance telephone and they motored a hundred miles or more, and when they arrived they

bragged about their speed. Once more Lanny thought of the English poet Clough, and his song

attributed to the devil in one of his many incarnations: "How pleasant it is to have money,

heigh ho! How pleasant it is to have money!"

These young people still had it, though the streams were drying up. The worst of the

embarrassments of a depression, as it presented itself to the daughter of J. Paramount Barnes,

was that so many of her friends kept getting into trouble and telling her about it. A truly

excruciating situation: in the midst of a bridge game at Tuxedo Park the hostess received a

telephone call from her broker in New York, and came in white-faced, saying that unless she

could raise fifty thousand dollars in cash by next morning she was "sunk." Not everybody had

that much money in the bank, and especially not in times when rumors were spreading about

this bank and that. Irma saw the eyes of the hostess fixed upon her, and was most

uncomfortable, because she couldn't remedy the depression all by herself and had to draw the

line somewhere.

Yes, it wasn't all fun having so much money. You didn't want to shut yourself up in yourself

and become hard-hearted and indifferent to others' suffering; but you found yourself

surrounded by people who wanted what you had and didn't always deserve it, people who had

never learned to do anything useful and who found themselves helpless as children in a crisis.

Of course they ought to go to work, but what could they do? All the jobs appeared to be filled

by persons who knew how to do them; right now there were said to be six, or eight, or ten

million people looking for jobs and not finding any. Moreover, Lanny and Irma didn't seem to be

exactly the right persons to be giving that sort of advice!

VIII

The first of July was a time for dividends, and many of the biggest and most important

corporations "passed" them. This gave a shock to Wall Street, and to those who lived by it;

Irma's income was cut still more, and the shrinkage seemed likely to continue. The news from

abroad was as bad as possible. Rick, who knew what was going on behind the scenes, wrote it to his

friend. The German Chancellor was in London, begging for funds, but nobody dared help him

any further; France was obdurate, because the Germans had committed the crime of

attempting to set up a customs union with Austria. But how could either of these countries

survive if they couldn't trade?

All Lanny's life it had been his habit to sit and listen to older people talking about the state of

the world. Now he knew more about it than most of the people he met, even the older ones.

While Irma played bridge, or table tennis with her young friends who had acquired amazing

skill at that fast game, Lanny would be telling the president of one of the great Wall Street

banks just why he had blundered in advising his clients to purchase the bonds of Fascist Italy,

or trying to convince one of the richest old ladies of America that she wasn't really helping to

fight Bolshevism when she gave money for the activities of the Nazis in the United States. Such

a charming, cultivated young German had been introduced to her, and had explained this holy

crusade to preserve Western civilization from the menace of Asiatic barbarism!

It was a highly complicated world for a devout Episcopalian and member of the D.A.R. to be

groping about in. A great banking fortune gave her enormous power, and she desired earnestly

to use it wisely. Lanny told her the various radical planks of the Nazi program, and the old lady

was struck with dismay. He told her how Hitler had been dropping these planks one by one,

and she took heart again. But he assured her that Hitler didn't mean the dropping any more

than he had meant the planks; what he wanted was to get power, and then he would do

whatever was necessary to keep it and increase it. Lanny found it impossible to make this

attitude real to gentle, well-bred, conscientious American ladies; it was just too awful. When

you persisted in talking about it, you only succeeded in persuading them that there must be

something wrong with your cynical self.

IX

Lanny just couldn't live with these overstuffed classes all the time; he became homesick for

his Reds and Pinks, and went into the hot, teeming city and paid another visit to the Rand

School of Social Science. He told them what he had been doing for workers' education on the

Riviera, and made a contribution to their expenses. The word spread quickly that here was the

bearer of a Fortunatus purse, and everybody who had a cause—there appeared to be hundreds

of them—began writing him letters or sending him mimeographed or printed appeals for

funds. The world was so full of troubles, and there were so few who cared!

Also he sent in a subscription to the New Leader, and got a weekly dose of the horrors of the

capitalist system, which had developed such marvelous powers of production and was unable

to use them; which left millions to starve while a few parasites fattened themselves in luxury.

This paper would lie on the table in his room, and Irma would see the prominent headlines

and say: "Oh, dear! Are you still reading that stuff?" It irritated her to be referred to as a

parasite and to have Lanny say: "But that's what we are," and go on to prove it.

Several of the workers' groups and labor unions had summer camps where their members

could spend a vacation. Lanny went to have a look at one of them, having the idea that he

ought to know the workers at first hand. But he made the mistake of taking his wife along,

which spoiled matters. Irma did her best, but she didn't know how to unbend. The place was

crowded, and mostly they were Jews; their dress was informal and their manners hearty; they

were having a good time in their own way, and didn't mind if it was different from her way;

they didn't look up to royalty, and didn't enjoy being looked at as a zoo. In short, as an effort to

bridge the social chasm the visit was a flop.

On the same South Shore of Long Island with the Barnes estate is the resort known as Coney

Island. Lanny had heard about it but had never seen it, and Irma had only vague memories

from a time in childhood when her father had taken her. On a hot Sunday afternoon the

perverse idea occurred to one of their smart crowd: "Let's go and see Coney!" It really was a

spectacle, they insisted; the world's premier slumming-tour—unless you went to Shanghai or

Bombay on one of those de luxe cruises.

Two motor-carloads of them drove to the resort, which is a long spit of land. It was hard to

find a place to park, and they had to walk a couple of miles; but they were young, and were

out for fun. There must have been a million people at the resort, and most of them crowded

onto the wide stretch of beach; it was barely possible to move about for the swarms of people

lying or sitting in the sand, sweltering in the blazing sunshine. If you wanted to know the

elementary facts about the human animal, here was the place to see exactly how fat they were,

or how skinny, how hairy, how bow-legged, how stoop-shouldered, how generally different

from the standards established by Praxiteles. You could discover also how they stank, what

raucous noises they made, what a variety of ill— odored foods they ate, and how utterly graceless

and superfluous they were.

To the fastidious Lanny Budd the worst thing of all was their emptiness of mind. They had

come for a holiday, and wanted to be entertained, and there was a seemingly endless avenue of

devices contrived for the purpose. For prices from a dime up you could be lifted on huge

revolving wheels, or whirled around sitting on brightly painted giraffes and zebras; you could

ride in tiny cars which bumped into one another, you could walk in dark tunnels which were a

perpetual earthquake, or in bright ones where sudden breezes whipped up the women's skirts

and made them scream; you could be frightened by ghosts and monsters—in short, you could

have a thousand fantastic things done to you, all expressive of the fact that you were an

animal and not a being with a mind; you could be humiliated and made ridiculous, but

rarely indeed on Coney Island could you be uplifted or inspired or taught any useful thing.

Lanny took this nightmare place as an embodiment of all the degradations which capitalism

inflicted upon the swarming millions of its victims. Anything to keep them from thinking.

Thus a young Pink; and he got himself into a red-hot argument with a carload of his young

companions, who had drawn their own conclusions from this immersion in carnality. Irma,

who monopolized a half-mile of ocean front, was disgusted that anyone should be content to

squat upon ten or a dozen square feet of it. Her childhood playmate, Babs Lorimer, whose

father had once had a "corner" in wheat, drew political conclusions from the spectacle and

wondered how anybody could conceive of the masses' having anything to say about the running

of government. "Noodles" Winthrop—his name was Newton—whose widowed mother collected a

small fraction of a cent from everyone who rode to Coney Island on a street railway, looked at

the problem biologically, and said he couldn't imagine how such hordes of ugly creatures had

survived, or why they desired to. Yet look at the babies they had!