Free First Papers by Laura Z. Hobson Page B

schoolgirls discovering a common joy.
    “And if women could vote,” Alida added, “I’d have voted for Debs three times too.”
    They had remained at the Paiges’ for an hour, exploring each other as if they were hungry. Evan Paige was a lawyer in New York, and through one of his first cases for a young convict who had broken parole, he had begun to do a good deal of voluntary work with the parole board for the city prisons. He still did, though of late he was increasingly active as attorney in free speech cases, and, with a group of other lawyers and one or two people in government, was trying to form a free speech league, to provide free legal counsel to “offenders” who could not retain lawyers of their own.
    They had only one son, Garrett, named after his mother’s family, who was to be a chemist when he finished college in June. Another son, Van, had died at fifteen of mastoiditis; he would have been twenty-four now and probably a lawyer like his father.
    Alexandra marveled at the way they could speak of their lost son, so calm and measured their tone, so much the victor over the pain that had been theirs and—how well she knew—still was. As she and Stefan were leaving, they met Garry, down from college for spring vacation, a handsome, fair-haired boy nearly twenty-one, spare and tall like his father, and seeming to offer friendliness on trust, expecting it to be accepted and returned, as his parents had done. Garry was to be married after Commencement Day to a girl named Letty Brooks. Later on in their acquaintance with the family, they met Letty, but Alexandra had taken a vague dislike to her.
    “A snob,” she had announced. “Maybe Alida and Evan aren’t fashionable enough to suit her. In a house like that, with real Oriental rugs and lace curtains to the floor.”
    Now, listening to Alida’s praise of the bunting, Alexandra saw that Letty alone of all the Paiges looked distant, perhaps even displeased. She was a pretty girl, with wavy black hair and light grey eyes, a startling color effect, and she had a willowy curving figure that any young man must find bewitching. But she, Alexandra, was not a bewitched young man, and she felt the vague dislike.
    “But, if Garry was still a child,” she said, talking just past Letty’s head to Alida, “would you do it to your porch?”
    “Sure she would,” Garry said.
    “If I thought of it,” Alida said.
    “Van and I were always getting some surprise or other,” Garry added, “and squawking over it.”
    “But,” Alexandra said to Garry, “you and your brother didn’t worry about being called crazy foreigners. That makes a difference.”
    “We had just as many battles with our children as you have with yours,” Alida said comfortably.
    “Just as hot ones?” Briefly, feeling it a treachery, Alexandra related the crises of the day. As she spoke, Evan, Alida and Garry occasionally exchanged glances of amusement. “And I really think,” she ended, “that it’s because Stefan and I still are foreigners in the children’s eyes—that’s what makes them anxious to be more American than George Washington.”
    “That may be part of it,” Evan said. “But not all.”
    “Dad,” Garrett said, “remember my first bloody nose?”
    “Some kid called him a spy,” Evan explained. “I was campaigning for Debs; and Van tried to bribe me to quit. They were eleven and thirteen and said I was mining their lives.”
    “I wish the girls were back, to hear this,” Alexandra said.
    “We offered to give up our allowance for a year,” Garry said, “if Dad would say he was for Bryan or McKinley and quit talking about the Spanish-American War and pacifism.”
    “Children always want to run with the herd, Alexandra,” his mother put in. “They grow out of it.”
    “Oh, I hope so.”
    “By die time I was a senior at Barnett High,” Garry ended, “I out-pacifisted even Dad and Mother.”
    Alexandra’s face was alight, and she suddenly said, “Eli and