Free I'm Dying Laughing by Christina Stead

and Bobby Franks, do you?’
    ‘Gee whittaker—you’re the yellow journalist, not me.’
    ‘I don’t believe Lennie exists. They’re milking you of his pittance.’
    ‘It crossed my mind,’ she said laughing; ‘but golly, I can’t say such things to them.’
    ‘If you can get his address, I’ll go to Belfast with you. There! It’s a deal.’
    They began laughing, he eased her on their way. They ate in the little restaurant where each student had his separate numbered napkin and they went to the Salle de la Mutualité to the congress; and in the evening they dropped in at the Opéra Comique and saw Louise by Gustave Charpentier, but she continued restless.
    ‘I guess I’m not happy living the perfect romance,’ she said to him; ‘it’s my training; it’s too good; I’m an unbeliever; how can it happen to Emily the Dope?’
    ‘But it can. You’ll get used to it. You’ll learn.’
    He began to talk about their future—we’ll do this, we’ll try that, we won’t have any children at first; I have a daughter and that’s enough. I’ll take you to the best hairdressers and couturières, we’ll get rid of your freckles, if you like. On the way back to the hotel, he bought her a large box of chocolates.
    He did everything with such gaiety, such inner and outward grace, she felt like a pleased child and yet she did not quite like it.
    ‘It’s because I’m used to the battle of life,’ she said to herself. ‘I’m a bugbear at the feast of life, a spotted clown, Emily Homespun, unlicked; I suppose I must learn the bong tong, the comme il faut. Pish! Pshaw! Can you bedizen a dancing bear? Besides, he says we’ll have no children—but he hasn’t said he loves me.’
    He hadn’t said so; and she thought to herself, astonished: ‘I have agreed to marry a stranger—H’m! OK. Well, we’ll see!’
    But she continued thoughtful. She did not know him well enough to size up the reality of this shipboard acquaintance and this sudden projected marriage.
    ‘And your family, Stephen?’
    ‘I was an invalid once; I’ll get my way. Anna loves me.’ After a moment, he added, ‘And then, they’re not sure!’
    ‘Not sure of you?’
    ‘The way my mother and uncles, the Howards that is, look at it, is, You never know. They’re not taken in really by theories of sunspots and crop failures and business cycles. They know the USA started from nothing: it wasn’t a business cycle, but something new. They know that after the French Revolution the rich men came back, but not the kings. If the Commune had seized the banks, what would have happened? My people and their cousins are hoping for Russia, that some day they’ll have business cycles, but it looks bad at present. Europe and the USA are goggling after socialism—they’ve had too much of business cycles. Though, my respected family will do their best; and their best is good. But you never know. Paul Valéry wrote “The time of the world’s end begins”; only a pen-pusher, true. One of our congress people said, “Some few among the greatest have already said yes to the future—but all have felt it, that a time is passing that can never come back.”’
    ‘Hitler is trying to put the clock back.’
    ‘They’ll help him, for he’s our barricade against socialism; he even has to call his socialism, to fool all the people all the time.’
    ‘People have always believed in the apocalypse,’ she said slowly.
    ‘This vision shakes us all. But we have no right to romance. Someone said those who flatter the people with false revolutionary legends are like a cartographer who would give sailors lying maps. And the apocalypse is such a lying map.’
    She said, ‘My God, what can we do—in the apocalypse? What an extraordinary race to belong to! Ants and bees have organised societies—so they say. It’s all nicely fixed up, mother to son; they don’t turn the anthill upside-down every twenty years. But we say, it’s a tenet, the tree of liberty must