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father had ever done a better day's business at the age of thirty-one.

The over-taxed swells of Vienna came running to meet the American heiress and to tell her

brilliant young husband what old masters they had available. Irma might have danced till

dawn every night, and Lanny might have made a respectable fortune, transferring culture to

the land of his fathers. But what he preferred was meeting Socialist writers and party leaders

and hearing their stories of suffering and struggle in this city which was like a head without a

body. The workers were overwhelmingly Socialist, while the peasants of the country districts

were Catholic and reactionary. To add to the confusion, the Hitlerites were carrying on a

tremendous drive, telling the country yokels and the city hooligans that all their troubles

were due to Jewish profiteers.

The municipal government, in spite of near-bankruptcy, was going bravely ahead with a

program of rehousing and other public services. This was the thing of which Lanny had been

dreaming, the socialization of industry by peaceful and orderly methods, and he became

excited about it and wished to spend his time traveling about looking at blocks of workers'

homes and talking to the people who lived in them. Amiable and well-bred people, going to

bed early to save light and fuel, and working hard at the task of making democracy a success.

Their earnings were pitifully small, and when Lanny heard stories of infant mortality and child

malnutrition and milk prices held up by profiteers, it rather spoiled his enjoyment of stately

banquets in mansions with historic names. Irma said: "You won't let yourself have any fun, so

we might as well go on home."

VI

It wasn't much better at Bienvenu, as the young wife was soon to learn. The world had become

bound together with ties invisible but none the less powerful, so that when the price of corn

and hogs dropped in Nebraska the price of flowers dropped on the Cap d'Antibes. Lanny

explained the phenomenon: the men who speculated in corn and hogs in Chicago no longer gave

their wives the money to buy imported perfumes, so the leading industry of the Cap went

broke. Leese, who ran Bienvenu, was besieged by nieces and nephews and cousins begging to

be taken onto the Budd staff. There was a swarm of them already, twice as many as would have

been employed for the same tasks on Long Island; but in the Midi they had learned how to

divide the work, and nobody ever died from overexertion. Now there were new ones added, and

it was a delicate problem, because it was Irma's money and she was entitled to have a say. What

she said was that servants oughtn't to be permitted to bother their employers with the hard-luck

stories of their relatives. Which meant that Irma still had a lot to learn about life in France!

The tourists didn't come, and the "season" was slow—so slow that it began to stop before it got

started. The hotelkeepers were frightened, the merchants of luxury goods were threatened

with ruin, and of course the poor paid for it. Lanny knew, because he went on helping with that

Socialist Sunday school, where he heard stories which spoiled his appetite and his enjoyment of

music, and troubled his wife because she knew what was in his thoughts—that she oughtn't to spend

money on clothes and parties while so many children weren't getting enough to eat.

But what could you do about it? You had to pay your servants, or at any rate feed them, and

it was demoralizing if you didn't give them work to do. Moreover, how could you keep up the

prices of foods except by buying some? Irma's father and uncles had fixed it firmly in her mind

that the way to make prosperity was to spend; but Lanny seemed to have the idea that you

ought to buy cheap foods and give them to the poor. Wouldn't that demoralize the poor and

make parasites of them? Irma thought she saw it happening to a bunch of "comrades" on the

Riviera who practically lived on the Budd bounty, and rarely said "Thank you." And besides,

what was to become of the people who raised the more expensive foods? Were they going to

have to eat them?

Life is a compromise. On Sunday evening Lanny would go down into the Old Town of Cannes

and explain the wastes of the competitive system to a group of thirty or forty proletarians:

French and Provencal, Ligurian and Corsican, Catalan and even one Algerian. On Monday

evening he would take his wife and mother to Sept Chenes and play accompaniments for a

singer from the Paris opera at one of Emily's soirees. On Tuesday he would spend the day helping

to get ready for a dinner-dance at Bienvenu, with a colored jazz band, Venetian lanterns with

electric lights all over the lawns, and the most fashionable and titled people coming to do

honor to the daughter of J. Paramount Barnes. Yes, there were still some who had money and

would not fail in their economic duty! People who had seen the storm coming and put their

fortune into bonds; people who owned strategic industries, such as the putting up of canned