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
