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!
