Johnny was as sturdy but rather less chubby, and his chin stuck out farther.  They had the same kind of smile, and square white teeth, and were greedy.  When they had been little, they had watched each other’s plates with hostile eyes, to see that neither got too large a helping.

4

Those of us who are old enough will remember that in June and July 1914 the conversation turned largely and tediously on militant suffragists, Irish rebels, and strikers.  It was the beginning of the age of violent enforcements of decision by physical action which has lasted ever since and shows as yet no signs of passing.  The Potter press, like so many other presses, snubbed the militant suffragists, smiled half approvingly on Carson’s rebels, and frowned wholly disapprovingly on the strikers.  It was a curious age, so near and yet so far, when the ordered frame of things was still unbroken, and violence a child’s dream, and poetry and art were taken with immense seriousness.  Those of us who can remember it should do so, for it will not return.  It has given place to the age of melodrama, when nothing is too strange to happen, and no one is ever surprised.  That, too, may pass, but probably will not, for it is primeval.  The other was artificial, a mere product of civilisation, and could not last.

It was in the intervals of talking about the militants (a conversation much like other conversations on the same topic, which were tedious even at the time, and now will certainly not bear recording) that Mrs. Frank said to the twins, ‘What are you two going to play at now?’

So extensive a question, opening such vistas.  It would have taken, if not less time, anyhow less trouble, to have told Mrs. Frank what they were not going to play at.

The devil of mischief looked out of Johnny’s gray eyes, as he nearly said, ‘We are going to fight Leila Yorke fiction and the Potter press.’

Choking it back, he said, succinctly, ’Publishing, journalism, and writing.  At least, I am.’

‘He means,’ Mr. Potter interpolated, in his small, nasal voice, ’that he has obtained a small and subordinate job with a firm of publishers, and hopes also to contribute to an obscure weekly paper run by a friend of his.’

‘Oh,’ said Mrs. Frank.  ’Not one of your papers, pater?  Can’t be, if it’s obscure, can it?’

’No, not one of my papers.  A periodical called, I believe, the Weekly Comment, with which you may or may not be familiar.’

‘Never heard of it, I’m afraid,’ Mrs. Frank confessed, truly.  ’Why don’t you go on to one of the family concerns, Johnny?  You’d get on much quicker there, with pater to shove you.’

‘Probably,’ Johnny agreed.

‘My papers,’ said Mr. Potter dryly, ’are not quite up to Johnny’s intellectual level.  Nor Jane’s.  Neither do they accord with their political sympathies.’

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