Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/28

 Well, I go to see Robbie, and it appears that Robbie likes me. I am young and ascetic-looking; the tension under which I have worked has given me dyspepsia, so my cheeks are hollow and my skin is white and my eyes have a hectic shine. Robbie, no doubt, is moved to sympathy by these phenomena; he himself is a picture of health, florid and jolly, a polo-player, what is called a "good fellow." He asks me, will I come to dinner at his home and meet some of his friends and his editorial staff? I answer that of course I will.

My worldly-wise friend insists that I shall invest my spare savings in a dress-suit, but I do not take this advice. I go to Robbie's palatial home in my old clothes, and Robbie's velvet-footed butler escorts me upstairs to Robbie's dressing-room, where Robbie's valet is laying out his things on the bed. And while Robbie is dressing, he tells me again how much he admires my article. It is the most illuminating discussion of present-day problems that he has ever read. He and his friends don't meet many Socialists, naturally, so I am to tell them about Socialism. I am to tell them everything, and needn't be afraid. I answer, quite simply, that I shall not be in the least afraid.

The evening was spoiled because Robbie's father came in. Old Peter Collier was a well-known character in New York "society"; but as not all my readers have been intimate in these circles, I explain that he had begun life as a pack-peddler, had started "Collier's Weekly" as an advertisement sheet, and by agents offering books as premiums had built up a tremendous circulation. Now he was rich and important; vulgar, ignorant as a child, but kind-hearted, jovial—one of those nice, fatherly old fellows who put their arms about you, no matter who you are.

And here he had come in to dinner with his son, and found his son entertaining a Socialist. "What? What's this?" he cried. It was like a scene in a comedy. He would hear one sentence of what I had to say, and then he would go up in the air. "Why—why—that's perfectly outrageous! Who ever heard of such a thing?" He would sputter for five or ten minutes, to the vast amusement of the rest of the guests.

Presently he heard about the "Open Letter to Lincoln Steffens." "What's this? You are going to publish an article like that in my magazine? No, sir! I won't have it! It's preposterous!" And there sat Robbie, who was supposed to