Bunny listened politely while his companion explained the ramifications of the Bolshevik plot. Not merely had these traitors sought to give the victory to Germany, they were now organizing a propaganda machine to overthrow civilized government all over the world; they were stirring up Negroes, Hindoos, Chinese and Mohammedans to rise and exterminate the white race. They had secret organizations with hundreds of thousands of followers in this country, they published or subsidized some eight hundred papers, all preaching class hatred. How could any man of decent instincts make a truce with this monstrosity? It was indeed terrifying, and difficult to answer; nevertheless, Bunny stuck it out, we had no right in Russia or Siberia, and if we would let the Bolsheviks alone, they couldn’t hurt us. When we suppressed people’s ideas, we made it seem that we couldn’t answer them; when we smashed up meetings and threw hundreds of people into jail for trying to attend meetings, we simply advertised the ideas we were trying to suppress, we made lots of other people sympathize with the victims. Look at those Russian Jewish boys and girls that had been arrested in New York, all of them under twenty; they had done nothing but distribute a leaflet appealing to the American people not to make war on Russia, yet they had been tortured in jail until one of them died, and the rest had got sentences of twenty years! When Eldon Burdick discovered that Bunny was defending vermin such as these, he first became hot, and then he became cold; and soon Bunny noticed that others of the guests were cold, and his sister came to him with flashing eyes, declaring that he had ruined her social career. X So Bunny went to visit Henrietta Ashleigh, at the beach-home of her family; located on a beautiful blue lagoon, with little white sail-boats dotted over it, and yellow and gray cliffs covered with Spanish bungalows of many-tinted plaster. Here, gliding about in a canoe, Bunny tried to justify his ideas, but met no better success. Henrietta had an invincible prejudice against Bolsheviks, and Bunny suspected the reason—she had heard about the nationalization of women. He would have liked to hint to her that he doubted the truth of these stories; but if it had been possible to mention such a subject to Henrietta, she would not have been his ideal of feminine purity.