It did not occur to him, or, indeed, to anyone else, that he was taking the line of least resistance. This state of being unresolved, on call, as it were, was painful to him, and he used to envy his friends who, as he said, were “sure.” The inconsistencies he found whenever he examined his own thoughts troubled him a good deal. He found, for example, that he liked to drink and dance and go to medium-smart night clubs with medium-pretty girls. Yet he believed with Veblen that there was no greater folly than conspicuous consumption, and his eyes and ears told him that people were hungry while he had money in his pocket. This was a problem all well-to-do radicals had to face, and there were any number of ways of dealing with it. You could stop being a radical, or you could give your money away. Or you could give a little of it away and say, “I owe something to myself,” or give none of it away, and say, “I’m not a saint, and besides I have something more important than money to contribute.” The Communist Party in those years did its best to settle this delicate question gracefully for prosperous fellow-travelers. It was reported that Browder had declared that there was nothing worse for the movement than what he called “a tired radical,” and that men and women would be better workers for the cause if they let themselves go and enjoyed life once in a while. This pronouncement was widely quoted—over cocktails in the Rainbow Room, and sometimes (even) over a bottle of champagne in more intimate boîtes; it was believed that this showed “the human side” of the Party leader, and gave the lie to those perpetual carpers (tired radicals, undoubtedly) who kept talking about Communist inflexibility. The example of Marx and Engels was also cited: they had had great Christmas parties and had called the young Kautsky a mollycoddle because he would not drink beer. (And how right their judgment had been! Forty years later Kautsky had betrayed the revolution by voting war credits in the German Reichstag, and Lenin had called him, among other things, an old woman.) Jim Barnett tried all these formulas on his conscience, but stretch them as he would, he could not make them cover the abyss between the theory and the practice. He decided, at last, to let the abyss yawn, and in the course of time he fell into it.