And they were in such a rush about their work. Over there in Paris, with all our smashing of idols, we had at least held fast to our one great goddess of art, we had slaved like dogs at the hard daily labor of honestly learning our various crafts. But here they stopped for nothing at all. The magazine writers were "tearing off copy," the painters were simply "slapping it down." One of them told me he "painted the real stuff right out of life"--dashed it off with one hand, so to speak, while he shook his fist at the town with the other. Everyone wanted to see something done--and done damn quick--about this, that or the other. My artist's eyes surveyed this group and twinkled with amused surprise. But I could sit by the hour and listen to their talk. I found it mighty refreshing, after those bills in the hardware shop, that monotonous martyr feeling of mine and those worries down by the harbor. But I felt the harbor always there, slowly closing in on my father, who looked older day by day, slowly bringing things to a crisis. In the garden behind our house on warm September evenings when these pigmies gathered to chatter reforms, the harbor hooted at their little plans as it had hooted at my own. One evening, I remember, when the talk had waxed hot and loud in favor of labor unions and strikes, Sue left the group and with a friend strolled to the lower end of the garden. There I saw them peer over the edge and listen to the drunken stokers singing in the barrooms deep under all these flower beds and all this adventurous chatter of ours. I thought of the years I had spent with Sam--and Sue, too, seemed to me to be having a spree. Poor kid, what a jolt she would get some day. She called me "our dreamer imported from France." But I was far from dreaming. Presently the harbor just opened one of its big eyes and sent up by a messenger a little grim reality. A Russian revolutionist had appeared among us with a letter to Sue from Joe Kramer. Joe, I found to my surprise, had seen quite a little of Sue over here while I had been in Paris--and from the various ships and hotels that had been his "home" of late, he had written her now and then. Through him Sue had joined a society known as "The Friends of Russian Freedom," and Joe wrote now from Moscow urging her to "stir up the crowd and lick this fellow into shape to talk at big meetings and raise some cash. He has the real goods," Joe added. "All he needs is the English language and a few points about making it yellow. If handled right he'll be a scream." He was handled right and he was a scream. Three months later he finished a tour that had netted over ten thousand dollars. Now to buy guns and ship them to Russia--where in the awful poverty bequeathed to them by the war with Japan, a bitter people was still fighting hard to make an end of autocracy. "I think I can help you, Puss," said Dad.