h, I forgot you two were silly old Socialists. Never mind, that'll pass
when they grow up, won't it, Frank?'

Secretly, Mrs. Frank thought that the twins had the disease because the
Potter family, however respectable now, wasn't really 'top-drawer.'

Funny old pater had, every one knew, begun his career as a reporter on a
provincial paper. If funny old pater had been just a shade less clever or
enterprising, his family would have been educated at grammar schools and
gone into business in their teens. Of course, Mrs. Potter had pulled the
social level up a bit; but what, if you came to that, had Mrs. Potter
been? Only the daughter of a country doctor; only the underpaid secretary
of a lady novelist, for all she was so conceited now.

So naturally Socialism, that disease of the underbred, had taken hold of
the less careful of the Potter young.

'And are you going to write for this weekly what-d'you-call-it too,
Jane?' Mrs. Frank inquired.

'No. I've not got a job yet. I'm going to look round a little first.'

'Oh, that's sense. Have a good time at home for a bit. Well, it's time
you had a holiday, isn't it? I wish old Frank could. He's working like an
old horse. He may slave himself to death for those Pimlico pigs, for all
any of them care. It's never "thank you"; it's always "more, more, more,"
with them. That's your Socialism, Johnny.'

The twins got on very well with their sister-in-law, but thought her a
fool. When, as she was fond of doing, she mentioned Socialism, they,
rightly believing her grasp of that economic system to be even less
complete than that of most people, always changed the subject.

But on this occasion they did not have time to change it before Clare
said, 'Mother's writing a novel about Socialism. She shows it up like
anything.'

Mrs. Potter smiled.

'I confess I am trying my hand at the burning subject. But as for
showing it up--well, I am being fair to both sides, I think. I don't
feel I can quite condemn it wholesale, as Peggy does. I find it very
difficult to treat anything like that--I can't help seeing all round a
thing. I'm told it's a weakness, and that I should get on better if I
saw everything in black and white, as so many people do, but it's no use
my trying to alter, at my time of life. One has to write in one's own
way or not at all.'

'Anyhow,' said Clare, 'it's going to be a ripping book, _Socialist
Cecily_; quite one of your best, mother.'

Clare had always been her