“You don’t look it.  Never forget how to laugh.  It’s a life-saver.  Laugh even at wars and killings.  Human life in each of us isn’t much.  It’s like that stream you’re spreading over the ground.  The drops fall back to earth, but the main stream is constant.  That’s all the life force cares about—­the main stream.  Doesn’t care about the drops; a few more or less here and there make no difference.”

“Yes, sir,” said Wilbur.

Dave Cowan scanned the front of the house.  The judge was not in sight.  He went softly to lean above the parrot’s cage and in low, wheedling tones, uttered words to it.

“Flapdoodle, Flapdoodle, Flapdoodle!” screeched the parrot in return, and laughed harshly.  The bird was a master of sarcastic inflection.

Dave came back looking pleased and proud.

“Almost human,” he declared.  “Kept back a few million years by accident—­our little feathered brother.”  He gestured toward the house.  “Old Flapdoodle, in there, he’s a rabid red these days.  Got tired of being a patriot.  Worked hard for a year trying to prove that Vielhaber was a German spy, flapping his curtain at night to the German Foreign Office.  But no one paid any attention to him except a few other flapdoodles, so then he began to read your brother’s precious words, and now he’s a violent comrade.  Fact! expecting any day that the workers will take things over and he’ll come into money—­money the interests have kept him out of.  He kind of licks his chops when he talks about it.  Never heard him talk about his wife’s share, though.  Say, that brother of yours is making a plumb fool of himself!”

“He didn’t understand.”

“No—­and he doesn’t yet.”

“Where is he now?”

“Oh”—­Dave circled a weary hand to the zenith—­“off somewhere holy-rolling.  Gets his name in the papers—­young poet radical that abandoned life of luxury to starve with toiling comrades.  Say, do you know what a toiling comrade gets per day now?  No matter.  Your brother hasn’t toiled any.  Makes red-hot speeches.  That Whipple bunch reared at last and shut off his magazine money, so he said he couldn’t take another cent wrung from the anguished sweat of serfs.  But it ain’t his hands he toils with, and he ain’t a real one, either.  Plenty of real ones in his bunch that would stand the gaff, but not him.  He’s a shine.  Of course they’re useful, these reds.  Keep things stirred up—­human yeast cakes, only they get to thinking they’re the dough, too.  That brother of yours knows all the lines; says ’em hot, too, but that’s only so he’ll get more notice.  Say, tell us about the war.

“It was an awful big one,” said his son.

* * * * *

Soon after a novel breakfast the following morning—­in that it was late and leisurely and he ate from a chair at a table—­he heard the squealing brakes of a motor car and saw one brought to a difficult stop at the Penniman gate.  Sharon Whipple, the driver, turned to look back at the machine indignantly, as if it had misbehaved.  Wilbur Cowan met him at the gate.