Evening of the Good Samaritan by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

would never dress before him.
    He stood a moment longer. “Elizabeth, you haven’t stopped loving me?”
    A smile crossed her lips, so sudden and brief he could not say if it were sweet or bitter. “No. Not yet.”

10
    A MARVELOUS THING ABOUT parliaments and politicians is the haste with which they can do something if it cannot be done at all otherwise. When history will wait, legislators quibble. In three years the New Deal had got through Congress a mountain of legislation, some good, some bad, but all aimed at national recovery on the level of everyman. There had been fervor before in Washington in living memory, the first Roosevelt’s administration and Wilson’s, surely, but it lacked the scope, the reach the New Deal had into far cottages and urban industry. Virtually no one who lived by the sweat of his brow was unaffected by it, and by 1936, those who lived by investment or on the managerial level, were also affected, for as of January 1, all industrial payrolls registered Social Security withholding payments.
    It could not be said that there was a large-scale crossing of traditional loyalties, particularly in the Lakewood suburb of Traders City. It may well have been there that Roosevelt was first called “a traitor to his class.” But here and there the younger scion of a moneyed family tended to go along with the President’s social philosophy even if neither he nor the President could precisely identify it. There was not time to precisely identify anything: too many people over the nation had little more by way of identification than their hunger.
    George Allan Bergner had grown up in Lakewood society, had married fashionably, but had taken early to the New Deal. He had virtually graduated into it from Harvard Law School. That reaction to his father’s conservatism was partially responsible George knew, but was unlikely to admit lest it seem to diminish the independent image he wished people to have of him. He and his father quarreled with the relentless zeal of religious partisans. Dr. Bergner thought equalitarianism a mischievous nonsense, and never missed the opportunity to point out to his son the ingratitude of the masses.
    “What have they got to be grateful for?” George would cry.
    “True, true,” the old man would say. “They’d be much better off never to have been born at all, most of them.”
    What George could not or would not understand was that half the time his father was deliberately overstating his own views by way of provocation. It was a compound of mischief and contempt on the old man’s part, and scarcely less reprehensible than bigotry. All this Alexander Winthrop understood very well. He had seen its origins in George’s school days when Dr. Bergner’s first impatient wrath was wreaked on John Dewey and “his damn fool pragmatism.” Nor had George ever been an honor student. Winthrop’s friendship with Doctor Bergner had developed over the years when George was away at school and then at Washington, and it was one of those contradictory attractions between men: Winthrop, himself the son of a tyrant to whom he had not been able to stand up, accepted on more or less equal terms by Dr. Bergner who failed to see the possible coming resemblance between Winthrop and his own son when he reached Winthrop’s age.
    That Winthrop understood the Bergners, father and son, made it no easier to spend an evening in their company. He arrived at the house, expecting to have dinner alone with Dr. Bergner. It was the evening of the day he and Elizabeth had gone to the dunes, and he had looked forward to it, by no means at ease with his own conscience. He had hoped to set things somewhat right with himself promoting young Hogan with the old doctor.
    George gave him too ostentatious a welcome for comfort: Winthrop knew he must have already got the political bug in his ear. From the outset he was playing to his father, even while speaking to Winthrop. Winthrop doubted he had played to Louise