Two of the Whipples were vastly puzzled by these pronouncements, and not a little disquieted.  Old Gideon and Harvey D. began to wonder if by any chance their boy, with his fine intellect, had not been misled.  Sharon was enraged by the scandalous assertions about George Washington, whom he had always considered a high-minded patriot.  He had never suspected and could not now be persuaded that Washington had basely tricked the soldiers of the Revolution into war so that the capitalistic class might prevail in the new states.  Nor would he believe that the framers of the Constitution had consciously worded that document with a view to enslaving the common people.  He was a stubborn old man, and not aware of his country’s darkness.  Perhaps it was too much to expect that one of his years and mental habit should be hospitable to these newly found truths.

He was not young America.  He had thought too long the other way.  Being of a choleric cast, he would at times be warmed into regrettable outbursts of opinion that were reactionary in the extreme.  Thus when he discussed with Gideon and Harvey D. the latest number of the magazine—­containing the fearless exposure of Washington’s chicanery—­he spoke in terms most slighting of Emmanuel Schilsky.  He meant his words to lap over to Merle Whipple, but as the others were still proud—­if in a troubled way—­of the boy’s new eminence, he did not distinguish him too pointedly.  He pretended to take it all out on Emmanuel, whom he declared to be no fair judge of American history.  The other Whipples were beginning to suspect this but were not prepared to admit it either to Sharon or to each other.  For the present they would defend Emmanuel against the hot-headed aspersions of the other.

“You said yourself, not a month ago,” expostulated Harvey D., “that he was a smart little Jew.”

Sharon considered briefly.

“Well,” he replied, “I don’t know as I’d change that—­at least not much.  I’d still say the same thing, or words to that effect.”

“Just how would you put it now?” demanded Gideon, suavely.

Sharon brightened.  He had hoped to be asked that.

“The way I’d put it now—­having read a lot more of his new-dawning—­I’d say he was a little Jew smarty.”

The other Whipples had winced at this.  The New Dawn was assuredly not the simple light-bringer to America’s spiritual darkness that they had supposed it would be; but they were not yet prepared to believe the worst.

“If only they wouldn’t be so extreme!” murmured the troubled Harvey D.  “If only they wouldn’t say the country has been tricked into war by capital.”

“That’s a short horse and soon curried,” said Sharon.  “They can’t say it if you quit paying for it.”

“There you are!” said Harvey D.  “Merle would say that that’s an example of capitalism suppressing the truth.  Of course I don’t know—­maybe it is.”