Secretly, Mrs. Frank thought that the twins had the disease because the Potter family, however respectable now, wasn’t really ‘top-drawer.’

Funny old pater had, every one knew, begun his career as a reporter on a provincial paper.  If funny old pater had been just a shade less clever or enterprising, his family would have been educated at grammar schools and gone into business in their teens.  Of course, Mrs. Potter had pulled the social level up a bit; but what, if you came to that, had Mrs. Potter been?  Only the daughter of a country doctor; only the underpaid secretary of a lady novelist, for all she was so conceited now.

So naturally Socialism, that disease of the underbred, had taken hold of the less careful of the Potter young.

’And are you going to write for this weekly what-d’you-call-it too, Jane?’ Mrs. Frank inquired.

‘No.  I’ve not got a job yet.  I’m going to look round a little first.’

’Oh, that’s sense.  Have a good time at home for a bit.  Well, it’s time you had a holiday, isn’t it?  I wish old Frank could.  He’s working like an old horse.  He may slave himself to death for those Pimlico pigs, for all any of them care.  It’s never “thank you”; it’s always “more, more, more,” with them.  That’s your Socialism, Johnny.’

The twins got on very well with their sister-in-law, but thought her a fool.  When, as she was fond of doing, she mentioned Socialism, they, rightly believing her grasp of that economic system to be even less complete than that of most people, always changed the subject.

But on this occasion they did not have time to change it before Clare said, ’Mother’s writing a novel about Socialism.  She shows it up like anything.’

Mrs. Potter smiled.

’I confess I am trying my hand at the burning subject.  But as for showing it up—­well, I am being fair to both sides, I think.  I don’t feel I can quite condemn it wholesale, as Peggy does.  I find it very difficult to treat anything like that—­I can’t help seeing all round a thing.  I’m told it’s a weakness, and that I should get on better if I saw everything in black and white, as so many people do, but it’s no use my trying to alter, at my time of life.  One has to write in one’s own way or not at all.’

‘Anyhow,’ said Clare, ’it’s going to be a ripping book, Socialist Cecily; quite one of your best, mother.’

Clare had always been her mother’s great stand-by in the matter of literature.  She was also useful as a touchstone, as what her mother did not call a foolometer.  If a book went with Clare, it went with Leila Yorke’s public beyond.  Mr. Potter was a less satisfactory reader; he regarded his wife’s books as goods for sale, and his comments were, ’That should go all right.  That’s done it,’ which attitude, though commercially helpful, was less really satisfying to the creator than Clare’s uncritical absorption in the characters and the story.  Clare was, in fact, the public, while Mr. Potter was more the salesman.