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around here,” she said, exaggerating for effect. “Aren’t you grateful that people who see the need for class struggle are helping the United States win the war?”
    “Reds are Reds, whether they’re black or white,” one of the men answered. “We’ve got the answer for any what gets out o’ line.” He set his fist by the side of his neck, then jerked his arm sharply upward and let his head fall to one side, as if he’d been hanged. “Anybody tries a revolution
here
, that’s what they get, and that’s what they deserve.”
    “I’m sure you would have told George Washington the same thing,” Flora said, and went upstairs. She felt the eyes of the Soldiers’ Circle men like daggers in her back till she opened the door and walked inside.
    Party headquarters, as usual, put her in mind of a three-ring circus crammed into about half a ring. Typewriters clattered. People shouted into telephones in Yiddish and English, often with scant regard for which language they were using at any given moment. Other people stood in the narrow spaces between desks or sat on the corners of the desks themselves and argued loudly and passionately about anything that happened to cross their minds. Flora looked on the chaos and smiled. It was, in an even larger, even more disorderly style, her family writ large.
    “Good morning, Maria,” she said to her secretary as she hung her hat on a tree near the desk.
    “Good morning,” Maria Tresca answered. She was one of the few gentiles at the Fourteenth Ward office, but was as enthusiastic for Socialism and its goals as anyone else; her sister, Angelina, had died in the Remembrance Day riots the year before. She studied Flora, then added, “You look pleased with yourself.”
    “Do I? Well, maybe I do,” Flora said. “I gave the bully boys downstairs something to think about.” She explained her crack about Washington. Maria grinned from ear to ear and clapped her hands together.
    Over at the next desk, Herman Bruck hung up the telephone on which he’d been speaking and sent Flora a stern look. A stern look from Bruck was not something to bear lightly. He might have stepped out of the pages of a fashion catalogue, from perfectly trimmed hair and neat mustache to suits always of fine wool and most modish cut. He often made a spokesman for the Socialists, simply because he looked so elegant. Money had not done it for him; coming from a family of fancy tailors had.
    “Washington was no revolutionary, not in the Marxist sense of the word,” he said now. “He didn’t transfer wealth or power from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie, and certainly not to the peasants. All he did was replace British planters and landowners with their American counterparts.”
    Flora tapped a fingernail against the top of her desk in annoyance. Herman Bruck would probably have made an even better Talmudic scholar than poor Yossel Reisen; he delighted in hairsplitting and precision. Only in chosen ideology did he differ from Yossel.
    “For one thing, Soldiers’ Circle goons don’t care about the Marxist sense of the word,” Flora said, holding onto her patience with both hands. “For another, by their use of the term, Washington
was
a revolutionary, and I got them to think about the consequences of denying the right to revolution now. Either that or I got them angry at me, which will do as well.”
    “It’s not proper,” Bruck answered stiffly. “We should be accurate about these matters. Educating the nation must be undertaken in an exact and thoroughgoing fashion.”
    “Yes, Herman.” Flora suppressed a sigh. The one thing Bruck lacked that would have made him a truly effective political operative was any trace of imagination. Before he could go on with what would, no doubt, have been a disputation to consume the entire morning, his telephone rang. He gave whoever was on the other end of the line the same sharply focused attention he had turned on Flora.
    Her own phone jangled a moment