3

_Socialist Cecily_ came out while they were at Lyme Regis. Mrs. Potter
sent the twins a copy. In their detached way, the twins read it, and gave
it to the others to look at.

'Very typical stuff,' Gideon summed it up, after a glance. 'It will no
doubt have an excellent sale.... It must be interesting for you to watch
it being turned out. I wish you would ask me to stay with you some time.
Yours must be an even more instructive household than mine.'

Gideon was a Russian Jew on his father's side, and a Harrovian. He had no
decency and no manners. He made Juke, who was an Englishman and an
Etonian, and had more of both, uncomfortable sometimes. For, after all,
the rudiments of family loyalty might as well be kept, among the general
destruction which he, more sanguinely than Gideon, hoped for.

But the twins did not bother. Jane said, in her equable way, 'You'll be
bored to death; angry, too; but come if you like.... We've a sister, more
Potterish than the parents. She'll hate you.'

Gideon said, 'I expect so,' and they left his prospective visit at that,
with Jane chuckling quietly at her private vision of Gideon and Clare in
juxtaposition.


4

But _Socialist Cecily_ did not have a good sale after all. It was
guillotined, with many of its betters, by the European war, which began