Read The Daredevils for Free Online Page B

once used by Napoleon as headquarters—and Father working their way rather desultorily but with good humor through a hypothetical labor problem.
    â€œThe painters’ union,” Father declared, “wants to limit the size of brushes. Are you for it or against it?”
    August (Gus) replied that it seemed clear that if they had bigger brushes they could get the job done more quickly.
    â€œI can confirm, then, that you are against any legislation that would restrict the size of a paintbrush?”
    Anthony (Tony) suggested that the painters would want above all to get the job the hell over with and go have a beer. If they had, say, two- or three-man brushes that were ten feet wide, they could be out of there in no time. They wouldn’t have to spend twelve hours a day, six days a week, slopping paint up and down a wall. They could listen to music, read a book—or even go to the theater! He flashed a grin at Charles. “I would advocate,” Tony went on, “discounted tickets for workingmen in those circumstances.”
    The twins were fair-skinned and freckled, with red-gold hair and handsome, ordinary features. Both of them knew how to beam, and would do so after an exchange like that. And while Father was still understood to be a rough and candid outdoorsman who had gambled on riverboats and been gunned down in a court in Arizona and who could beam with the best of California’s grinning Western swindlers, and who was in fact one of a handful of men who had been nicknamed “The Regenerators,” who had battled graft in the courts and rebuilt San Francisco with their own hands, he also still believed that Jesus Christ was his personal savior and insisted on rather passionately Puritan manners: Gus would sober up at that point but Tony continue to grin, even as he apologized.
    â€œI’m sorry, Father.”
    Mother, Amelia, and Amelia’s husband, the Reverend Doctor Thomas Ruggles, entered the dining room. Charles pulled his watch from its pocket and saw that it must have stopped sometime the night before. He was disoriented by the idea more than he thought he should be. It in fact troubledhim, and he looked around the room, wondering if he was being seen being troubled, itself an act of discomposure and even guilt that troubled him even more. He felt sweat forming on his face. Why did he care what time it was? If he was sweating, why not act it out? See it through and be sweaty.
    â€œMother? Amelia?” asked Tony. “I hope you’ll forgive my rude remarks.” Trying to make the grin rueful. “Reverend Ruggles?”
    â€œWe don’t know what you’re talking about, Tony,” said Reverend Ruggles, “but that is no bar to forgiveness.” Ruggles was small but agile and strong, built like a gymnast, and he put a headlock on Tony. He often came at you as if he wanted to wrestle or box, or walking on his hands. It was one thing to speak of a muscular Christianity, but who dared speak of a fun Christianity? If the clownishness, however, had not been in the immediate company of a deep, almost disturbing seriousness, it would have been a different matter. He was a Baptist but the family could not help but like him.
    Amelia, a year older than Charles, had been, before the earthquake, incredibly high-strung and unhappy, but brilliant: like Henry Adams’s wife Marian and Henry James’s sister Alice, Charles sometimes said. He had grown up thinking she was going to die any second, that he would find her collapsed with a stroke or hanging by the neck, but had found wells of compassion rising up in her, where everyone had expected hysteria even in the very best, in ideal circumstances, and humility descending like a blessing, a consolation from a gentle, just, clear, and sweet heaven. She was an all but entirely different woman, and people did not shrink from speaking of her transformation as miraculous. She would only say that she had been