Everyone cheered when Bruck reported what Max Fleischmann had said. Maria Tresca remarked, "If we keep on like this, in 1920 the Democrats won't bother to run anybody at all in this district, any more than the Republicans do now." The secretary was a lone Italian in an office full of Jews, but probably the most ardent Socialist there-and, by now, not the least fluent in Yiddish, either.

"Maybe in 1920-alevai in 1920… the White House," Herman Bruck said softly. Silence fell while people thought about that. When Teddy Roosevelt rode the crest of the wave after winning the Great War, such dreams from a Socialist would have been only dreams, and pipe dreams at that. Now, with the cost of the war clearer, with the strife that followed-maybe the dream could turn real.

Flora did check the roster of poll-watchers, and suggested some changes and additions. If you want something done right, do it yourself, she thought. After everything satisfied her, she headed back to the flat where she'd lived most of her life. The years on the floor of Congress had sharpened her debating: she had no trouble discouraging Bruck from walking along with her.

Coming in through the door reminded her anew of how much her life had changed. The apartment where she lived alone in Philadelphia was far bigger than this one, which housed her parents, two brothers, two sisters, and a toddler nephew, and which had housed her as well. It hadn't seemed particularly crowded before she went away: everyone she knew lived the same way, and sometimes took in boarders to help make ends meet. Now she knew there were other possibilities.

Her sisters, Sophie and Esther, helped her mother in the kitchen. The smell of beef-and-barley soup rising from the pot on the stove mingled with the scent of her father's pipe tobacco to make the odor of home. Her brothers, David and Isaac, bent over a chess board at one corner of the dining-room table. All was as it had been there, too, save for the crutch on the floor by David's chair.

David moved a knight and looked smug. Isaac grunted, as if in pain. Looking up from the board, he consciously noticed Flora for the first time, though she hadn't been particularly quiet. "Hello," he said. "Got my conscription notice today." He was eighteen, two years younger than his brother.

"You knew it was coming," Flora said, and Isaac nodded: everyone put in his two years. Flora quietly thanked the God in Whom her Marxist exterior did not believe that Isaac would serve in peacetime. By the way David's face twisted for a moment, that thought was going through his mind, too.

"How does the leg feel?" she asked him.

He slapped it. The sound it made was nothing like that of flesh: closer to furniture. "Not too bad," he said. "I manage. I only need one leg for a sewing-machine treadle, and it doesn't much matter which." At that, guilt rose up and smote Flora. Seeing it, her brother said, "I didn't mean to give you a hard time. It's just the way things are, that's all."

A fresh puff of smoke rose from behind the Daily Forward their father was reading. Abraham Hamburger said, "It's usually not a good idea to say anything that makes you explain yourself afterwards."

"I wish more Congressmen would pay attention to that advice, Father," Flora said, which caused fresh smoke signals to rise from behind the Yiddish newspaper.

Little Yossel Reisen grabbed Flora by the leg and gravely said, "Wowa": the closest he could come to her name. Then he walked on unsteady feet to Sophie and said, "Mama." That he had down solid.

Sophie Reisen stirred the soup, then picked him up. Yossel's father, after whom he was named, had never seen him; he'd been killed in Virginia long before the baby was born. Had he not got Sophie in a family way, they probably wouldn't have been married before he met a bullet.

When supper reached the table, the tastes of home were as familiar as the smell. Afterwards, Flora helped her mother with the dishes. "You will win again," Sarah Hamburger said with calm assurance.

She would have thought the same had Flora reckoned herself out of the running. As things were, Flora nodded. "Yes, I think I will," she answered, and her mother beamed; Sarah Hamburger had known it all along.

Going to sleep that night was a fresh trial for Flora. She'd got used to dozing off in quiet surroundings, queer as the notion would have struck her before she went to Congress. The racket in the apartment, the sort of noise that had once lulled her, now set her teeth on edge because she wasn't accustomed to it any more. Even having to answer Esther's "Good night" struck her as an imposition.

She stumped hard through the last few days of the campaign. On Tuesday the fifth, she voted at Public School 130. The Socialist poll-watcher tipped his cap to her; his Democratic opposite number did not raise his expensive black homburg.

Then it was back to Socialist Party headquarters to wait for the polls to close in the district and across the country. As the night lengthened, telephone lines and telephone clickers began bringing in reports. By the third set of numbers from her district, she knew she was going to beat Marcus Krauskopf: her lead was close to two to one.

Well before midnight, Krauskopf read the writing on the wall and telephoned to concede. "Mazeltov" he said graciously. "Now that you've won, go right on being the conscience of the House. They need one there, believe me."

"Thank you very much," she said. "You ran a good race." That wasn't quite true, but matched his graciousness.

"I did what I could." She could almost hear him shrug over the wire. "But you've made a name for yourself, it's a Socialist district anyhow, and I don't think this is a Democratic year."

As if to underscore that, Maria Tresca exclaimed, "We just elected a Socialist in the twenty-eighth district in Pennsylvania. Where is that, anyhow?"

People looked at maps. After a minute or so, Herman Bruck said, "It's way up in the northwestern part of the state. We've never elected a Socialist Congressman from around there before- too many farmers, not enough miners. Maybe the people really have had enough of the Democratic Party."

"Even if they are finally fed up, it's taken them much too long to get that way," Maria said. As far as she was concerned, the proletarian revolution was welcome to start tomorrow, or even tonight.

The later it got, the more returns came in from the West. The first numbers from Dakota showed Hosea Blackford handily ahead in his district. "A sound man," Herman Bruck said.

"Sound? Half the time, he sounds like a Democrat," Maria Tresca said darkly.

But even her ideological purity melted in the face of the gains the Socialists were making. A couple of districts in and just outside Toledo that had never been anything but Democratic were going Socialist tonight. The same thing happened in Illinois and Michigan and, eventually, in distant California, too.

"Is it a majority?" Flora asked, a question she hadn't thought she would need tonight. She'd been optimistic going into the election, but there was a difference between optimism and cockeyed optimism.

Except, tonight, maybe there wasn't. "I don't know." Herman Bruck sounded like a man doing his best to restrain astonished awe. "A lot of these races are still close. But it could be." He looked toward a map where he'd been coloring Socialist districts red. "It really could be."

Every time Cincinnatus Driver got downwind of the Kentucky Smoke House, spit gushed into his mouth. He couldn't help it; Apicius Wood ran the best barbecue joint in Kentucky, very possibly the best in the USA. Negroes from the neighborhood came to the Kentucky Smoke House. So did Covington's whites. And so did the men who'd come down from the other side of the Ohio since the Stars and Stripes replaced the Stars and Bars atop the city hall. Nobody turned up his nose at food like that.