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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Main Street" and "Babbitt," Sinclair Lewis masterfully critiques American societal norms in the early 20th century through incisive character studies and vivid depictions of small-town life. "Main Street" follows the journey of Carol Kennicott, who struggles against the conformity and provincialism of her hometown, showcasing her intellectual aspirations and relentless desire for cultural enrichment. In contrast, "Babbitt" centers around George F. Babbitt, a middle-class real estate broker whose life reflects the emptiness of consumerism and societal pressure, ultimately leading him to a quest for authenticity in a world rife with hypocrisy. Lewis employs a blend of realism and satire, creating an engaging narrative that reveals the complexities of American identity during the Jazz Age. Sinclair Lewis, the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, was profoundly influenced by his own Midwestern upbringing and the societal limitations he observed. His works are often autobiographical, reflecting his critiques of materialism and conformity. By drawing upon his experiences, Lewis illuminates the struggles of individuals yearning for deeper meaning in a rapidly industrializing society, capturing the essence of American life with unparalleled insight. Both "Main Street" and "Babbitt" are essential reads for those interested in social commentary and the human condition. Lewis's sharp observations and rich prose invite readers to reflect on their own lives within the cultural milieu, making these novels timeless in their relevance. An exploration of societal expectations and personal identity, this duo offers a profound understanding of the duality of American experience. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Main Street & Babbitt
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection brings together Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922), two landmark American novels that defined his reputation and contributed to the recognition he later received with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930. Presented as a focused pairing rather than a comprehensive edition, the volume’s purpose is to place side by side Lewis’s most influential portraits of the American middle class in the years after the First World War. By reading them together, one encounters a sustained examination of everyday ambitions and anxieties, rendered with a satirist’s bite and a realist’s care. The scope is direct: two complete novels in conversation, inviting comparison across subject, setting, and style.
Both works are novels of social realism and satire. They are not memoirs, essays, or short fiction, and this collection contains no plays, poems, letters, or diaries. Lewis composes fully realized narratives grounded in the routines of business, family life, and civic activity, with close attention to speech, habit, and local custom. The storytelling is linear, scene-driven, and populated by ensembles that bring out the pressures of community. Although the tone can be comic, the books remain resolutely novelistic in their architecture and aims: to capture a living cross-section of American society and test its ideals against the daily compromises of ordinary people.
Main Street follows Carol, a young woman whose marriage brings her to Gopher Prairie, a fictional small town in Minnesota. With energy and imagination, she hopes to improve the town’s cultural life, only to find herself confronting tradition, familiarity, and the limits of reform. Babbitt centers on George F. Babbitt, a successful real estate broker in Zenith, a fictional Midwestern city typified by business boosterism and club life. He navigates professional networks and social expectations while sensing a disquiet he cannot easily name. Both premises are modest by design, allowing the novels to observe how ordinary settings shape thought and behavior.
Across these novels, Lewis examines conformity, ambition, status, and the contested meaning of the American Dream. He is interested in how communities praise practicality and order yet resist change, and how individuals negotiate the distance between their private aspirations and public roles. The books trace the rituals of meetings, sales, parties, and domestic routines to show how belonging is performed and enforced. They also consider the allure of progress—better houses, cleaner streets, bigger businesses—alongside the fear of difference. In place of melodrama, Lewis offers the steady friction of everyday life, where small choices and casual remarks carry social weight.
Stylistically, Lewis blends plain-spoken American prose with a keen, often ironic narrator. He has a reporter’s ear for how people talk and a satirist’s eye for slogans, advertisements, and the texture of civic enthusiasm. Catalogues of objects, club titles, brand names, and street scenes build a sense of lived environment without ornament. Humor arises not from extravagant caricature but from the precise juxtaposition of what people say and what they do. The result is a tone that can feel brisk and genial on the surface, yet edged with unease, as the narration continually tests the distance between ideals and realities.
Written and first published in the early 1920s, the novels sit squarely in the postwar United States, amid rapid urbanization, new consumer goods, expanding professional classes, and the rise of the automobile. Civic boosterism, chambers of commerce, service clubs, and business associations form vital backdrops. The fiction registers the rhythms of modernity—advertising, standardization, and the promise of efficiency—alongside the persistence of local habits and hierarchies. In Gopher Prairie, the scale is intimate, with attention to neighbors’ opinions and routines. In Zenith, the scale is larger, with traffic, skyscrapers, and deal-making. Together they map a cultural landscape in transition.
Lewis draws characters with sympathy and scrutiny. Protagonists and minor figures alike are recognizable without descending into mere types. Carol’s idealism, impatience, and humor coexist, complicating any simple diagnosis of her efforts. George Babbitt’s confidence, salesmanship, and unease are equally entwined. Surrounding them are colleagues, club members, storekeepers, doctors, ministers, and neighbors whose chatter and customs anchor the social world. The novels allow room for contradictions, letting characters be generous in one scene and ungenerous in the next. That moral variability is central to the books’ persuasiveness: change, when it appears, is incremental, contested, and never guaranteed.
Main Street drew national attention for its portrait of small-town life, and Babbitt quickly became a cultural touchstone. The very name Babbitt entered common usage to denote a complacent, conformist strain of middle-class materialism. These novels solidified Lewis’s position as a leading American novelist and contributed to the recognition he later received with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930. Their endurance rests not only on controversy or coinage, however, but on the accuracy of their observation. Readers continue to recognize the institutions and incentives they catalog, even as particulars shift with time and technology.
Read together, the novels form a diptych of American social life, one panel small-town, the other metropolitan. The pairing invites attention to scale—how the pressures to conform differ when everyone knows your name versus when your network is professional and civic. It also underlines continuities across environments: the search for respectability, the metrics of success, the subtle punishments for dissent. In one frame, reform is cultural taste and civic uplift; in the other, it is personal restlessness amid prosperity. The volume’s purpose is to let these echoes and contrasts resonate without separating them into different contexts.
The reading experience is marked by clarity, momentum, and scenes that reward close listening. Dialogue carries much of the characterization, and recurring settings—offices, parlors, streets, clubs—become stages where status is negotiated. Lewis’s pacing balances anecdote and accumulation, so that humor and satire deepen into social portraiture. The novels can be read independently and appreciated on their own terms, yet each casts light on the other’s preoccupations. Encountered together, they sharpen questions about what counts as success, what community requires, and where individual contentment might be found within the routines of modern life.
This volume is deliberately limited in scope. It offers the two novels as they stand, without attempting to assemble the author’s complete works or to survey his broader output in drama, stories, or journalism. That focus keeps attention on the narratives themselves and on the continuities they share. Readers seeking biographical materials, letters, or contemporary criticism will find them outside this collection; the aim here is immersion in the fictional worlds. By concentrating on Main Street and Babbitt alone, the collection highlights how much of Lewis’s lasting contribution to American letters is contained within these concentrated studies.
However one approaches them—historically, sociologically, or simply as engrossing stories—these novels retain a striking immediacy. They catch the voices of their moment and, in doing so, continue to illuminate habits and hopes that persist. The towns and cities have grown, and the technologies have changed, yet the tensions they explore between belonging and independence, public image and private desire, remain recognizable. This collection invites readers to listen closely, compare patiently, and consider how two different vantage points render a shared national drama. The result is a portrait not of heroes and villains, but of a society arguing with itself.
Author Biography
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) was an American novelist, satirist, and public critic of the national culture, best known for anatomizing small-town mores, business boosterism, professional life, and political credulity during the early and mid-twentieth century. His brisk, reportorial realism and comic indignation made him a defining voice of the interwar United States. In 1930 he became the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, recognized for creating vivid social types and for a prose that fused journalistic detail with theatrical verve. Across more than three decades, his fiction traced the promises and pressures of modern American life with skeptical, reformist energy.
Raised in Minnesota, Lewis developed an early fascination with books, newspapers, and the texture of everyday speech, interests that would anchor his mature style. He studied at Yale University, where he contributed to student publications and sharpened a taste for topical satire and character sketches. After college he gravitated to New York’s publishing world, taking editorial and freelance assignments that trained him in deadlines, market instincts, and narrative economy. His reading and milieu aligned him with American realism and naturalism and with Progressive Era debates about business, reform, science, and religion. European social fiction and contemporary journalism also informed his technique.
In the 1910s Lewis published short fiction, travel writing, and novels that tested themes he would later refine. Our Mr. Wrenn (1914) follows a timid clerk’s imaginative revolt; The Trail of the Hawk (1915) explores ambition and risk; The Job (1917) treats women’s work and urban mobility; and Free Air (1919) celebrates the open road and the new culture of the automobile. These books earned modest notice, but they established his habits of close observation, brisk dialogue, and social taxonomy. He learned to balance caricature and sympathy while mapping the rites, clichés, and aspirations of an increasingly standardized America.
Main Street (1920) made Lewis a national figure. Its portrait of small-town conformity struck readers as both documentary and provocation. Babbitt (1922) sharpened his satire into a study of middle-class boosterism, and the word “babbitt” entered the language as a label for complacent conformity. Arrowsmith (1925) examined the ideals and compromises of medical research, praised for its realism and moral complexity. When the book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Lewis declined the honor, asserting his independence from prescriptive notions of “American life.” Together, these works defined his blend of social comedy, ethical inquiry, and an almost ethnographic eye for milieu.
Through the late 1920s and 1930s he expanded his range while sustaining public controversy. Elmer Gantry (1927) skewered religious opportunism and provoked fierce debate. Dodsworth (1929) traced American manners abroad and the tensions of marriage and status. Ann Vickers (1933) engaged reform movements and the changing roles of professional women. It Can’t Happen Here (1935) imagined an authoritarian turn in the United States, a work often revived in anxious political moments. In 1930 Lewis received the Nobel Prize in Literature and used the occasion to decry censorship and conformity, aligning his public voice with the critical energies of his fiction.
Lewis continued to publish at a steady pace, with uneven reception but persistent visibility. The Prodigal Parents (1938) and Bethel Merriday (1940) examined generational conflict and the theater world. Gideon Planish (1943) lampooned institutional self-dealing, while Cass Timberlane (1945) returned to Midwestern mores through a judicial lens. Kingsblood Royal (1947) confronted race and status in midcentury America, and The God-Seeker (1949) looked back to frontier origins and missionary zeal. He lectured widely, traveled in the United States and Europe, and remained a tireless observer of speech, habit, and public performance, even as critics debated the consistency of his later work.
Lewis died in Rome in 1951, leaving a body of work that reshaped the American social novel. His books are still read for their brisk scenes, quotable talk, and sharp typologies of business, medicine, religion, and politics. Main Street remains a touchstone for debates about provincial life and reform; Babbitt supplied a durable name for conformist ambition; Arrowsmith engages readers interested in the ethics of science; and It Can’t Happen Here periodically returns to public conversation. As the first American Nobel laureate in literature, he demonstrated that a reportorial, satiric realism could claim both popular audiences and international recognition.
Historical Context
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951), born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, built his career by anatomizing American provincial and middle-class life during the turbulent decades bracketing World War I. Educated at Yale (B.A., 1908) and seasoned by stints in New York publishing, he combined journalistic observation with satiric verve. Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922) appeared at the cusp of the 1920s, when the nation confronted rapid urban growth, consumer capitalism, and cultural standardization. His later Nobel Prize in Literature (1930), the first awarded to an American, consecrated a project already visible in these works: a sustained critique of boosterism, conformity, and the moral ambiguities of professional life in the modern United States.
The backdrop to Lewis’s early masterpieces is the Progressive Era (roughly 1890s–1920), which reshaped municipal governance, public health, and social policy. Reformers such as Jane Addams in Chicago and muckraking journalists like Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell exposed corruption and corporate abuses, inspiring city-manager charters, sanitary codes, and civic-improvement leagues. The United States Chamber of Commerce, founded in 1912, formalized booster rhetoric, while local committees promoted parks, paved streets, and “better homes” campaigns. This reformist energy, often earnest yet self-congratulatory, generated the civic stage on which Lewis dramatized the tensions between ideals of public service and the realities of status-seeking and local orthodoxy.
The 1920 federal census recorded that, for the first time, a majority of Americans lived in urban areas, marking a demographic pivot that frames Lewis’s critique. Regional towns of the Upper Midwest—Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas—felt the pull of Minneapolis–St. Paul and Chicago, while rail and road networks knit hinterland to metropolis. The Great Migration, accelerating after 1916, brought African Americans from the South into northern cities like Chicago and Detroit, altering labor markets and racial politics. These movements eroded older small-town insularity yet also provoked defensive insistence on local homogeneity, revealing the uneasy coexistence of modern mobility and anxious parochialism.
Mass production, scientific management, and national advertising supply another decisive context. Frederick Winslow Taylor’s efficiency doctrines, Henry Ford’s assembly line (1913), and the $5 day (1914) helped normalize standardized products and routines. Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) had already coined “conspicuous consumption,” a diagnosis given new force by the 1920s advertising boom, with practitioners such as Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays (Crystallizing Public Opinion, 1923) shaping desire through magazines, billboards, and radio. The spread of brand names, installment credit, and chain stores promoted a new language of aspiration and status that resonated in both small-town parlors and metropolitan boardrooms.
Lewis’s fiction probes the rise of credentialed professionalism that transformed American life between 1900 and 1930. The Flexner Report (1910) rationalized medical education and elevated the American Medical Association’s standards; bar associations tightened ethics; the National Association of Real Estate Boards (founded 1908) codified practice and promoted zoning. Landmark court decisions such as Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. (1926) legitimated comprehensive land-use regulation, recasting city growth as a technocratic domain. In this culture of associations, conferences, and “best practices,” titles and membership pins became tokens of virtue, intertwining genuine expertise with the social theater of status maintenance.
Moral reform and its discontents thread through the era. The 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act took effect in January 1920, launching Prohibition and a nationwide economy of evasion—speakeasies, bootleggers, and selective enforcement. Evangelists such as Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson drew crowds with muscular Protestantism, while the Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy split denominations and influenced civic norms. The Scopes “Monkey” Trial (Dayton, Tennessee, 1925), pitting Clarence Darrow against William Jennings Bryan, symbolized the cultural struggle over science, scripture, and public education. This moral battleground—earnest, censorious, and sometimes hypocritical—formed a key environment for Lewis’s scrutiny of public virtue and private appetite.
World War I and its aftermath left deep marks on civic life and public rhetoric. The Committee on Public Information, led by George Creel (1917–1919), coordinated propaganda, linking patriotism to consumption and volunteerism. The 1919–1920 Red Scare under Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer fostered raids, deportations, and loyalty campaigns, while the American Legion, founded in 1919 and chartered by Congress the same year, became a prominent guardian of orthodoxy in many towns. Anxiety about radicals, foreigners, and dissent solidified a climate in which respectability and conformity carried new penalties and rewards—conditions that Lewis repeatedly explored in his portraits of clubs, committees, and professional circles.
Immigration restriction and nativism reshaped American identity in the early 1920s. The Emergency Quota Act (1921) and the Johnson–Reed Act (1924) curtailed arrivals, especially from Southern and Eastern Europe, endorsing a hierarchical vision of national belonging. The revived Ku Klux Klan, founded on Stone Mountain in 1915, expanded into the Midwest and West, peaking around 1924 amid scandals like the D. C. Stephenson case in Indiana. Americanization programs in schools and factories taught English, civics, and “100 percent” loyalty. This defensive nationalism influenced hiring, housing, and club memberships, while leaving a palpable imprint on the manners and speech of aspirant middle-class communities.
Women’s civic power and cultural roles were in transition. The 19th Amendment (1920) enfranchised women, consolidating decades of clubwork, temperance advocacy, and settlement-house reform. College-educated women entered professions in teaching, librarianship, social work, and medicine, even as marriage and domestic expectations remained strong. Home economics and “scientific housekeeping” promised rational order, while the flapper style and new leisure norms challenged Victorian proprieties. The rise of women’s civic groups—from parent–teacher associations to literary clubs—altered local politics, planning, and philanthropy. The resulting mix of reformism, cultural experimentation, and persistent constraint supplies an essential frame for Lewis’s depictions of aspiration and social surveillance.
Technological media transformed both the rhythms and the horizons of everyday life. By 1920, telephones and electric lighting were common in towns; KDKA in Pittsburgh broadcast the 1920 election returns; national radio networks followed later in the decade. Movies standardized narrative conventions and celebrity culture, while phonographs and dance halls diffused jazz beyond urban cores. Automobility, with paved roads financed by the Federal Highway Act of 1921, expanded leisure travel and commuting, bringing tourist courts, billboards, and roadside commerce to the fringes of towns. These media and transport innovations knit communities into national markets and tastes, complicating the defense of strictly local values.
Lewis wrote within an evolving literary field that prized realism and social satire. Predecessors and contemporaries—Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Sherwood Anderson—mapped class, region, and moral ambiguity with new candor. H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, through The Smart Set and later The American Mercury (founded 1924), championed critical irreverence toward American philistinism, influencing reception of socially diagnostic fiction. The magazine marketplace, from the Saturday Evening Post to Harper’s, rewarded detailed reportage and brand-name precision. Lewis’s narrative method—empirically stocked, satirically pitched, institutionally attentive—thus grew from a larger realist project that treated the town and the office as decisive theaters of character.
Publishing and reception shaped the cultural fortunes of Lewis’s work. Issued by Harcourt, Brace—then a rising New York house—his novels reached vast audiences; Main Street reportedly sold hundreds of thousands of copies within months, and Babbitt entrenched itself in public discourse so firmly that “Babbittry” quickly became a shorthand for complacent, status-conscious boosterism. In 1926, Lewis declined the Pulitzer Prize awarded to Arrowsmith, criticizing the prize’s criteria and asserting artistic independence. His Nobel Prize in 1930, citing vigorous and graphic art of description, affirmed the international significance of American social satire, while ensuring that his earlier portraits of civic culture remained canonical points of reference.
Geography mattered to Lewis’s investigations. The Upper Midwest furnished the idioms, winters, and institutions of his imagined towns and cities, yet the economic and cultural vectors he traced flowed outward to Chicago, Cleveland, and New York. Rail depots, grain elevators, mail-order houses, and wholesale jobbers linked prairie Main Streets to national circuits. The “Zenith” of booster fantasy—a composite Midwestern city—was less a map point than a symbol of nationwide middle-class aspiration. By foregrounding place as social texture—weather, sidewalks, Rotary lunches—Lewis grounded national arguments in the material details of region, demonstrating how local habits both absorb and resist currents from distant capitals.
The business cycle and retail transformation of the 1910s and 1920s set powerful constraints on towns and their elites. A sharp recession in 1920–1921 gave way to sustained expansion, as installment credit and mass distribution fueled purchases of cars, radios, and furniture. Chain stores such as A&P and Woolworth, along with catalog giants like Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward, undercut independent merchants, provoking anti-chain politics and “Buy Local” campaigns. The language of efficiency and turnover migrated from factory to shop floor to civic meeting, indexing a moral economy that measured virtue in sales figures and square footage—even as it frayed older solidarities.
Civic design and the physical plant of everyday life were likewise being reimagined. Inspired by the City Beautiful movement after the 1893 World’s Fair, towns pursued boulevards, neoclassical city halls, and landscaped squares. Carnegie philanthropy funded more than 1,600 public libraries in the United States (1886–1919), embedding literacy in brick and limestone. Bungalows and foursquares proliferated on gridded streets, while zoning separated homes, stores, and factories, and streetcar lines gave way to arterial roads and filling stations. Newspaper editorials and real estate circulars promised that the right facade, setback, and traffic plan could harmonize profit with public virtue—a faith Lewis probed without sentimentality.
Race, ethnicity, and housing policy formed a less visible but decisive part of middle-class order. The Great Migration altered neighborhoods; the “Red Summer” of 1919 exposed violent fault lines. Professional real estate ethics hardened segregation: by the mid-1920s, the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ Code of Ethics (notably in 1924) counseled against introducing “members of any race or nationality” deemed detrimental to property values, while racially restrictive covenants spread through subdivisions. Such norms, enforced by brokers, banks, and courts, shaped school districts, club rosters, and retail geographies. The era’s respectable surfaces thus concealed systematic exclusions that reinforced the conformity and complacency Lewis dissected.
The long afterlife of these contexts underscores their historical weight. The stock market crash (1929) and the Depression reframed earlier optimism, while Lewis continued to anatomize American institutions in works like It Can’t Happen Here (1935). Yet the social coordinates fixed around 1915–1925—booster clubs, professional guilds, zoning maps, consumer display, radio chatter, and Prohibition-era duplicities—remained legible in mid-century towns. Lewis died in Rome in 1951 and was buried in Sauk Centre, but his portraits endured as a composite archive of the American middle class. Read together, Main Street and Babbitt stand within this larger map of reform, reaction, and aspiration that defined his career.
Synopsis (Selection)
Babbitt
Follows George F. Babbitt, a prosperous real-estate broker in the Midwestern city of Zenith, as he navigates the pressures of business, civic boosterism, and social conformity. A bout of midlife restlessness leads him to test the boundaries of the values that shape his community.
Main Street
Centers on Carol Milford Kennicott, who moves from the city to Gopher Prairie and tries to energize the town’s cultural and civic life. Her efforts expose the tensions between idealistic reform and the entrenched habits of small-town society.
Main Street & Babbitt
Babbitt
CHAPTER I
I
THE towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. They were neither citadels nor churches, but frankly and beautifully office-buildings.
The mist took pity on the fretted structures of earlier generations: the Post Office with its shingle-tortured mansard, the red brick minarets of hulking old houses, factories with stingy and sooted windows, wooden tenements colored like mud. The city was full of such grotesqueries, but the clean towers were thrusting them from the business center, and on the farther hills were shining new houses, homes — they seemed — for laughter and tranquillity.
Over a concrete bridge fled a limousine of long sleek hood and noiseless engine. These people in evening clothes were returning from an all-night rehearsal of a Little Theater play, an artistic adventure considerably illuminated by champagne. Below the bridge curved a railroad, a maze of green and crimson lights. The New York Flyer boomed past, and twenty lines of polished steel leaped into the glare.
In one of the skyscrapers the wires of the Associated Press were closing down. The telegraph operators wearily raised their celluloid eye-shades after a night of talking with Paris and Peking. Through the building crawled the scrubwomen, yawning, their old shoes slapping. The dawn mist spun away. Cues of men with lunch-boxes clumped toward the immensity of new factories, sheets of glass and hollow tile, glittering shops where five thousand men worked beneath one roof, pouring out the honest wares that would be sold up the Euphrates and across the veldt. The whistles rolled out in greeting a chorus cheerful as the April dawn; the song of labor in a city built — it seemed — for giants.
II
There was nothing of the giant in the aspect of the man who was beginning to awaken on the sleeping-porch of a Dutch Colonial house in that residential district of Zenith known as Floral Heights.
His name was George F. Babbitt. He was forty-six years old now, in April, 1920, and he made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry, but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.
His large head was pink, his brown hair thin and dry. His face was babyish in slumber, despite his wrinkles and the red spectacle-dents on the slopes of his nose. He was not fat but he was exceedingly well fed; his cheeks were pads, and the unroughened hand which lay helpless upon the khaki-colored blanket was slightly puffy. He seemed prosperous, extremely married and unromantic; and altogether unromantic appeared this sleeping-porch, which looked on one sizable elm, two respectable grass-plots, a cement driveway, and a corrugated iron garage. Yet Babbitt was again dreaming of the fairy child, a dream more romantic than scarlet pagodas by a silver sea.
For years the fairy child had come to him. Where others saw but Georgie Babbitt, she discerned gallant youth. She waited for him, in the darkness beyond mysterious groves. When at last he could slip away from the crowded house he darted to her. His wife, his clamoring friends, sought to follow, but he escaped, the girl fleet beside him, and they crouched together on a shadowy hillside. She was so slim, so white, so eager! She cried that he was gay and valiant, that she would wait for him, that they would sail —
Rumble and bang of the milk-truck.
Babbitt moaned; turned over; struggled back toward his dream. He could see only her face now, beyond misty waters. The furnace-man slammed the basement door. A dog barked in the next yard. As Babbitt sank blissfully into a dim warm tide, the paper-carrier went by whistling, and the rolled-up Advocate thumped the front door. Babbitt roused, his stomach constricted with alarm. As he relaxed, he was pierced by the familiar and irritating rattle of some one cranking a Ford: snap-ah-ah, snap-ah-ah, snap-ah-ah. Himself a pious motorist, Babbitt cranked with the unseen driver, with him waited through taut hours for the roar of the starting engine, with him agonized as the roar ceased and again began the infernal patient snap-ah-ah — a round, flat sound, a shivering cold-morning sound, a sound infuriating and inescapable. Not till the rising voice of the motor told him that the Ford was moving was he released from the panting tension. He glanced once at his favorite tree, elm twigs against the gold patina of sky, and fumbled for sleep as for a drug. He who had been a boy very credulous of life was no longer greatly interested in the possible and improbable adventures of each new day.
He escaped from reality till the alarm-clock rang, at seven-twenty.
III
It was the best of nationally advertised and quantitatively produced alarm-clocks, with all modern attachments, including cathedral chime, intermittent alarm, and a phosphorescent dial. Babbitt was proud of being awakened by such a rich device. Socially it was almost as creditable as buying expensive cord tires.
He sulkily admitted now that there was no more escape, but he lay and detested the grind of the real-estate business, and disliked his family, and disliked himself for disliking them. The evening before, he had played poker at Vergil Gunch's till midnight, and after such holidays he was irritable before breakfast. It may have been the tremendous home-brewed beer of the prohibition-era and the cigars to which that beer enticed him; it may have been resentment of return from this fine, bold man-world to a restricted region of wives and stenographers, and of suggestions not to smoke so much.
From the bedroom beside the sleeping-porch, his wife's detestably cheerful “Time to get up, Georgie boy,” and the itchy sound, the brisk and scratchy sound, of combing hairs out of a stiff brush.
He grunted; he dragged his thick legs, in faded baby-blue pajamas, from under the khaki blanket; he sat on the edge of the cot, running his fingers through his wild hair, while his plump feet mechanically felt for his slippers. He looked regretfully at the blanket — forever a suggestion to him of freedom and heroism. He had bought it for a camping trip which had never come off. It symbolized gorgeous loafing, gorgeous cursing, virile flannel shirts.
He creaked to his feet, groaning at the waves of pain which passed behind his eyeballs. Though he waited for their scorching recurrence, he looked blurrily out at the yard. It delighted him, as always; it was the neat yard of a successful business man of Zenith, that is, it was perfection, and made him also perfect. He regarded the corrugated iron garage. For the three-hundred-and-sixty-fifth time in a year he reflected, “No class to that tin shack. Have to build me a frame garage. But by golly it's the only thing on the place that isn't up-to-date!” While he stared he thought of a community garage for his acreage development, Glen Oriole. He stopped puffing and jiggling. His arms were akimbo. His petulant, sleep-swollen face was set in harder lines. He suddenly seemed capable, an official, a man to contrive, to direct, to get things done.
On the vigor of his idea he was carried down the hard, clean, unused-looking hall into the bathroom.
Though the house was not large it had, like all houses on Floral Heights, an altogether royal bathroom of porcelain and glazed tile and metal sleek as silver. The towel-rack was a rod of clear glass set in nickel. The tub was long enough for a Prussian Guard, and above the set bowl was a sensational exhibit of tooth-brush holder, shaving-brush holder, soap-dish, sponge-dish, and medicine-cabinet, so glittering and so ingenious that they resembled an electrical instrument-board. But the Babbitt whose god was Modern Appliances was not pleased. The air of the bathroom was thick with the smell of a heathen toothpaste. “Verona been at it again! 'Stead of sticking to Lilidol, like I've re-peat-ed-ly asked her, she's gone and gotten some confounded stinkum stuff that makes you sick!”
The bath-mat was wrinkled and the floor was wet. (His daughter Verona eccentrically took baths in the morning, now and then.) He slipped on the mat, and slid against the tub. He said “Damn!” Furiously he snatched up his tube of shaving-cream, furiously he lathered, with a belligerent slapping of the unctuous brush, furiously he raked his plump cheeks with a safety-razor. It pulled. The blade was dull. He said, “Damn — oh — oh — damn it!”
He hunted through the medicine-cabinet for a packet of new razor-blades (reflecting, as invariably, “Be cheaper to buy one of these dinguses and strop your own blades,”) and when he discovered the packet, behind the round box of bicarbonate of soda, he thought ill of his wife for putting it there and very well of himself for not saying “Damn.” But he did say it, immediately afterward, when with wet and soap-slippery fingers he tried to remove the horrible little envelope and crisp clinging oiled paper from the new blade. Then there was the problem, oft-pondered, never solved, of what to do with the old blade, which might imperil the fingers of his young. As usual, he tossed it on top of the medicine-cabinet, with a mental note that some day he must remove the fifty or sixty other blades that were also temporarily, piled up there. He finished his shaving in a growing testiness increased by his spinning headache and by the emptiness in his stomach. When he was done, his round face smooth and streamy and his eyes stinging from soapy water, he reached for a towel. The family towels were wet, wet and clammy and vile, all of them wet, he found, as he blindly snatched them — his own face-towel, his wife's, Verona's, Ted's, Tinka's, and the lone bath-towel with the huge welt of initial. Then George F. Babbitt did a dismaying thing. He wiped his face on the guest-towel! It was a pansy-embroidered trifle which always hung there to indicate that the Babbitts were in the best Floral Heights society. No one had ever used it. No guest had ever dared to. Guests secretively took a corner of the nearest regular towel.
He was raging, “By golly, here they go and use up all the towels, every doggone one of 'em, and they use 'em and get 'em all wet and sopping, and never put out a dry one for me — of course, I'm the goat! — and then I want one and — I'm the only person in the doggone house that's got the slightest doggone bit of consideration for other people and thoughtfulness and consider there may be others that may want to use the doggone bathroom after me and consider — ”
He was pitching the chill abominations into the bath-tub, pleased by the vindictiveness of that desolate flapping sound; and in the midst his wife serenely trotted in, observed serenely, “Why Georgie dear, what are you doing? Are you going to wash out the towels? Why, you needn't wash out the towels. Oh, Georgie, you didn't go and use the guest-towel, did you?”
It is not recorded that he was able to answer.
For the first time in weeks he was sufficiently roused by his wife to look at her.
IV
Myra Babbitt — Mrs. George F. Babbitt — was definitely mature. She had creases from the corners of her mouth to the bottom of her chin, and her plump neck bagged. But the thing that marked her as having passed the line was that she no longer had reticences before her husband, and no longer worried about not having reticences. She was in a petticoat now, and corsets which bulged, and unaware of being seen in bulgy corsets. She had become so dully habituated to married life that in her full matronliness she was as sexless as an anemic nun. She was a good woman, a kind woman, a diligent woman, but no one, save perhaps Tinka her ten-year-old, was at all interested in her or entirely aware that she was alive.
After a rather thorough discussion of all the domestic and social aspects of towels she apologized to Babbitt for his having an alcoholic headache; and he recovered enough to endure the search for a B.V.D. undershirt which had, he pointed out, malevolently been concealed among his clean pajamas.
He was fairly amiable in the conference on the brown suit.
“What do you think, Myra?” He pawed at the clothes hunched on a chair in their bedroom, while she moved about mysteriously adjusting and patting her petticoat and, to his jaundiced eye, never seeming to get on with her dressing. “How about it? Shall I wear the brown suit another day?”
“Well, it looks awfully nice on you.”
“I know, but gosh, it needs pressing.”
“That's so. Perhaps it does.”
“It certainly could stand being pressed, all right.”
“Yes, perhaps it wouldn't hurt it to be pressed.”
“But gee, the coat doesn't need pressing. No sense in having the whole darn suit pressed, when the coat doesn't need it.”
“That's so.”
“But the pants certainly need it, all right. Look at them — look at those wrinkles — the pants certainly do need pressing.”
“That's so. Oh, Georgie, why couldn't you wear the brown coat with the blue trousers we were wondering what we'd do with them?”
“Good Lord! Did you ever in all my life know me to wear the coat of one suit and the pants of another? What do you think I am? A busted bookkeeper?”
“Well, why don't you put on the dark gray suit to-day, and stop in at the tailor and leave the brown trousers?”
“Well, they certainly need — Now where the devil is that gray suit? Oh, yes, here we are.”
He was able to get through the other crises of dressing with comparative resoluteness and calm.
His first adornment was the sleeveless dimity B.V.D. undershirt, in which he resembled a small boy humorlessly wearing a cheesecloth tabard at a civic pageant. He never put on B.V.D.'s without thanking the God of Progress that he didn't wear tight, long, old-fashioned undergarments, like his father-in-law and partner, Henry Thompson. His second embellishment was combing and slicking back his hair. It gave him a tremendous forehead, arching up two inches beyond the former hair-line. But most wonder-working of all was the donning of his spectacles.
There is character in spectacles — the pretentious tortoiseshell, the meek pince-nez of the school teacher, the twisted silver-framed glasses of the old villager. Babbitt's spectacles had huge, circular, frameless lenses of the very best glass; the ear-pieces were thin bars of gold. In them he was the modern business man; one who gave orders to clerks and drove a car and played occasional golf and was scholarly in regard to Salesmanship. His head suddenly appeared not babyish but weighty, and you noted his heavy, blunt nose, his straight mouth and thick, long upper lip, his chin overfleshy but strong; with respect you beheld him put on the rest of his uniform as a Solid Citizen.
The gray suit was well cut, well made, and completely undistinguished. It was a standard suit. White piping on the V of the vest added a flavor of law and learning. His shoes were black laced boots, good boots, honest boots, standard boots, extraordinarily uninteresting boots. The only frivolity was in his purple knitted scarf. With considerable comment on the matter to Mrs. Babbitt (who, acrobatically fastening the back of her blouse to her skirt with a safety-pin, did not hear a word he said), he chose between the purple scarf and a tapestry effect with stringless brown harps among blown palms, and into it he thrust a snake-head pin with opal eyes.
A sensational event was changing from the brown suit to the gray the contents of his pockets. He was earnest about these objects. They were of eternal importance, like baseball or the Republican Party. They included a fountain pen and a silver pencil (always lacking a supply of new leads) which belonged in the righthand upper vest pocket. Without them he would have felt naked. On his watch-chain were a gold penknife, silver cigar-cutter, seven keys (the use of two of which he had forgotten), and incidentally a good watch. Depending from the chain was a large, yellowish elk's-tooth-proclamation of his membership in the Brotherly and Protective Order of Elks. Most significant of all was his loose-leaf pocket note-book, that modern and efficient note-book which contained the addresses of people whom he had forgotten, prudent memoranda of postal money-orders which had reached their destinations months ago, stamps which had lost their mucilage, clippings of verses by T. Cholmondeley Frink and of the newspaper editorials from which Babbitt got his opinions and his polysyllables, notes to be sure and do things which he did not intend to do, and one curious inscription — D.S.S. D.M.Y.P.D.F.
But he had no cigarette-case. No one had ever happened to give him one, so he hadn't the habit, and people who carried cigarette-cases he regarded as effeminate.
Last, he stuck in his lapel the Boosters' Club button. With the conciseness of great art the button displayed two words: “Boosters-Pep!” It made Babbitt feel loyal and important. It associated him with Good Fellows, with men who were nice and human, and important in business circles. It was his V.C., his Legion of Honor ribbon, his Phi Beta Kappa key.
With the subtleties of dressing ran other complex worries. “I feel kind of punk this morning,” he said. “I think I had too much dinner last evening. You oughtn't to serve those heavy banana fritters.”
“But you asked me to have some.”
“I know, but — I tell you, when a fellow gets past forty he has to look after his digestion. There's a lot of fellows that don't take proper care of themselves. I tell you at forty a man's a fool or his doctor — I mean, his own doctor. Folks don't give enough attention to this matter of dieting. Now I think — Course a man ought to have a good meal after the day's work, but it would be a good thing for both of us if we took lighter lunches.”
“But Georgie, here at home I always do have a light lunch.”
“Mean to imply I make a hog of myself, eating down-town? Yes, sure! You'd have a swell time if you had to eat the truck that new steward hands out to us at the Athletic Club! But I certainly do feel out of sorts, this morning. Funny, got a pain down here on the left side — but no, that wouldn't be appendicitis, would it? Last night, when I was driving over to Verg Gunch's, I felt a pain in my stomach, too. Right here it was — kind of a sharp shooting pain. I — Where'd that dime go to? Why don't you serve more prunes at breakfast? Of course I eat an apple every evening — an apple a day keeps the doctor away — but still, you ought to have more prunes, and not all these fancy doodads.”
“The last time I had prunes you didn't eat them.”
“Well, I didn't feel like eating 'em, I suppose. Matter of fact, I think I did eat some of 'em. Anyway — I tell you it's mighty important to — I was saying to Verg Gunch, just last evening, most people don't take sufficient care of their diges — ”
“Shall we have the Gunches for our dinner, next week?”
“Why sure; you bet.”
“Now see here, George: I want you to put on your nice dinner-jacket that evening.”
“Rats! The rest of 'em won't want to dress.”
“Of course they will. You remember when you didn't dress for the Littlefields' supper-party, and all the rest did, and how embarrassed you were.”
“Embarrassed, hell! I wasn't embarrassed. Everybody knows I can put on as expensive a Tux. as anybody else, and I should worry if I don't happen to have it on sometimes. All a darn nuisance, anyway. All right for a woman, that stays around the house all the time, but when a fellow's worked like the dickens all day, he doesn't want to go and hustle his head off getting into the soup-and-fish for a lot of folks that he's seen in just reg'lar ordinary clothes that same day.”
“You know you enjoy being seen in one. The other evening you admitted you were glad I'd insisted on your dressing. You said you felt a lot better for it. And oh, Georgie, I do wish you wouldn't say 'Tux.' It's 'dinner-jacket.'”
“Rats, what's the odds?”
“Well, it's what all the nice folks say. Suppose Lucile McKelvey heard you calling it a 'Tux.'”
“Well, that's all right now! Lucile McKelvey can't pull anything on me! Her folks are common as mud, even if her husband and her dad are millionaires! I suppose you're trying to rub in your exalted social position! Well, let me tell you that your revered paternal ancestor, Henry T., doesn't even call it a 'Tux.'! He calls it a 'bobtail jacket for a ringtail monkey,' and you couldn't get him into one unless you chloroformed him!”
“Now don't be horrid, George.”
“Well, I don't want to be horrid, but Lord! you're getting as fussy as Verona. Ever since she got out of college she's been too rambunctious to live with — doesn't know what she wants — well, I know what she wants! — all she wants is to marry a millionaire, and live in Europe, and hold some preacher's hand, and simultaneously at the same time stay right here in Zenith and be some blooming kind of a socialist agitator or boss charity-worker or some damn thing! Lord, and Ted is just as bad! He wants to go to college, and he doesn't want to go to college. Only one of the three that knows her own mind is Tinka. Simply can't understand how I ever came to have a pair of shillyshallying children like Rone and Ted. I may not be any Rockefeller or James J. Shakespeare, but I certainly do know my own mind, and I do keep right on plugging along in the office and — Do you know the latest? Far as I can figure out, Ted's new bee is he'd like to be a movie actor and — And here I've told him a hundred times, if he'll go to college and law-school and make good, I'll set him up in business and — Verona just exactly as bad. Doesn't know what she wants. Well, well, come on! Aren't you ready yet? The girl rang the bell three minutes ago.”
V
Before he followed his wife, Babbitt stood at the westernmost window of their room. This residential settlement, Floral Heights, was on a rise; and though the center of the city was three miles away — Zenith had between three and four hundred thousand inhabitants now — he could see the top of the Second National Tower, an Indiana limestone building of thirty-five stories.
Its shining walls rose against April sky to a simple cornice like a streak of white fire. Integrity was in the tower, and decision. It bore its strength lightly as a tall soldier. As Babbitt stared, the nervousness was soothed from his face, his slack chin lifted in reverence. All he articulated was “That's one lovely sight!” but he was inspired by the rhythm of the city; his love of it renewed. He beheld the tower as a temple-spire of the religion of business, a faith passionate, exalted, surpassing common men; and as he clumped down to breakfast he whistled the ballad “Oh, by gee, by gosh, by jingo” as though it were a hymn melancholy and noble.
CHAPTER II
I
RELIEVED of Babbitt's bumbling and the soft grunts with which his wife expressed the sympathy she was too experienced to feel and much too experienced not to show, their bedroom settled instantly into impersonality.
It gave on the sleeping-porch. It served both of them as dressing-room, and on the coldest nights Babbitt luxuriously gave up the duty of being manly and retreated to the bed inside, to curl his toes in the warmth and laugh at the January gale.
The room displayed a modest and pleasant color-scheme, after one of the best standard designs of the decorator who “did the interiors” for most of the speculative-builders' houses in Zenith. The walls were gray, the woodwork white, the rug a serene blue; and very much like mahogany was the furniture — the bureau with its great clear mirror, Mrs. Babbitt's dressing-table with toilet-articles of almost solid silver, the plain twin beds, between them a small table holding a standard electric bedside lamp, a glass for water, and a standard bedside book with colored illustrations — what particular book it was cannot be ascertained, since no one had ever opened it. The mattresses were firm but not hard, triumphant modern mattresses which had cost a great deal of money; the hot-water radiator was of exactly the proper scientific surface for the cubic contents of the room. The windows were large and easily opened, with the best catches and cords, and Holland roller-shades guaranteed not to crack. It was a masterpiece among bedrooms, right out of Cheerful Modern Houses for Medium Incomes. Only it had nothing to do with the Babbitts, nor with any one else. If people had ever lived and loved here, read thrillers at midnight and lain in beautiful indolence on a Sunday morning, there were no signs of it. It had the air of being a very good room in a very good hotel. One expected the chambermaid to come in and make it ready for people who would stay but one night, go without looking back, and never think of it again.
Every second house in Floral Heights had a bedroom precisely like this.
The Babbitts' house was five years old. It was all as competent and glossy as this bedroom. It had the best of taste, the best of inexpensive rugs, a simple and laudable architecture, and the latest conveniences. Throughout, electricity took the place of candles and slatternly hearth-fires. Along the bedroom baseboard were three plugs for electric lamps, concealed by little brass doors. In the halls were plugs for the vacuum cleaner, and in the living-room plugs for the piano lamp, for the electric fan. The trim dining-room (with its admirable oak buffet, its leaded-glass cupboard, its creamy plaster walls, its modest scene of a salmon expiring upon a pile of oysters) had plugs which supplied the electric percolator and the electric toaster.
In fact there was but one thing wrong with the Babbitt house: It was not a home.
II
Often of a morning Babbitt came bouncing and jesting in to breakfast. But things were mysteriously awry to-day. As he pontifically tread the upper hall he looked into Verona's bedroom and protested, “What's the use of giving the family a high-class house when they don't appreciate it and tend to business and get down to brass tacks?”
He marched upon them: Verona, a dumpy brown-haired girl of twenty-two, just out of Bryn Mawr, given to solicitudes about duty and sex and God and the unconquerable bagginess of the gray sports-suit she was now wearing. Ted — Theodore Roosevelt Babbitt — a decorative boy of seventeen. Tinka — Katherine — still a baby at ten, with radiant red hair and a thin skin which hinted of too much candy and too many ice cream sodas. Babbitt did not show his vague irritation as he tramped in. He really disliked being a family tyrant, and his nagging was as meaningless as it was frequent. He shouted at Tinka, “Well, kittiedoolie!” It was the only pet name in his vocabulary, except the “dear” and “hon.” with which he recognized his wife, and he flung it at Tinka every morning.
He gulped a cup of coffee in the hope of pacifying his stomach and his soul. His stomach ceased to feel as though it did not belong to him, but Verona began to be conscientious and annoying, and abruptly there returned to Babbitt the doubts regarding life and families and business which had clawed at him when his dream-life and the slim fairy girl had fled.
Verona had for six months been filing-clerk at the Gruensberg Leather Company offices, with a prospect of becoming secretary to Mr. Gruensberg and thus, as Babbitt defined it, “getting some good out of your expensive college education till you're ready to marry and settle down.”
But now said Verona: “Father! I was talking to a classmate of mine that's working for the Associated Charities — oh, Dad, there's the sweetest little babies that come to the milk-station there! — and I feel as though I ought to be doing something worth while like that.”
“What do you mean 'worth while'? If you get to be Gruensberg's secretary — and maybe you would, if you kept up your shorthand and didn't go sneaking off to concerts and talkfests every evening — I guess you'll find thirty-five or forty bones a week worth while!”
“I know, but — oh, I want to — contribute — I wish I were working in a settlement-house. I wonder if I could get one of the department-stores to let me put in a welfare-department with a nice rest-room and chintzes and wicker chairs and so on and so forth. Or I could — ”
“Now you look here! The first thing you got to understand is that all this uplift and flipflop and settlement-work and recreation is nothing in God's world but the entering wedge for socialism. The sooner a man learns he isn't going to be coddled, and he needn't expect a lot of free grub and, uh, all these free classes and flipflop and doodads for his kids unless he earns 'em, why, the sooner he'll get on the job and produce — produce — produce! That's what the country needs, and not all this fancy stuff that just enfeebles the will-power of the working man and gives his kids a lot of notions above their class. And you — if you'd tend to business instead of fooling and fussing — All the time! When I was a young man I made up my mind what I wanted to do, and stuck to it through thick and thin, and that's why I'm where I am to-day, and — Myra! What do you let the girl chop the toast up into these dinky little chunks for? Can't get your fist onto 'em. Half cold, anyway!”
Ted Babbitt, junior in the great East Side High School, had been making hiccup-like sounds of interruption. He blurted now, “Say, Rone, you going to — ”
Verona whirled. “Ted! Will you kindly not interrupt us when we're talking about serious matters!”
“Aw punk,” said Ted judicially. “Ever since somebody slipped up and let you out of college, Ammonia, you been pulling these nut conversations about what-nots and so-on-and-so-forths. Are you going to — I want to use the car tonight.”
Babbitt snorted, “Oh, you do! May want it myself!” Verona protested, “Oh, you do, Mr. Smarty! I'm going to take it myself!” Tinka wailed, “Oh, papa, you said maybe you'd drive us down to Rosedale!” and Mrs. Babbitt, “Careful, Tinka, your sleeve is in the butter.” They glared, and Verona hurled, “Ted, you're a perfect pig about the car!”
“Course you're not! Not a-tall!” Ted could be maddeningly bland. “You just want to grab it off, right after dinner, and leave it in front of some skirt's house all evening while you sit and gas about lite'ature and the highbrows you're going to marry — if they only propose!”
“Well, Dad oughtn't to EVER let you have it! You and those beastly Jones boys drive like maniacs. The idea of your taking the turn on Chautauqua Place at forty miles an hour!”
“Aw, where do you get that stuff! You're so darn scared of the car that you drive up-hill with the emergency brake on!”
“I do not! And you — Always talking about how much you know about motors, and Eunice Littlefield told me you said the battery fed the generator!”
“You — why, my good woman, you don't know a generator from a differential.” Not unreasonably was Ted lofty with her. He was a natural mechanic, a maker and tinkerer of machines; he lisped in blueprints for the blueprints came.
“That'll do now!” Babbitt flung in mechanically, as he lighted the gloriously satisfying first cigar of the day and tasted the exhilarating drug of the Advocate-Times headlines.
Ted negotiated: “Gee, honest, Rone, I don't want to take the old boat, but I promised couple o' girls in my class I'd drive 'em down to the rehearsal of the school chorus, and, gee, I don't want to, but a gentleman's got to keep his social engagements.”
“Well, upon my word! You and your social engagements! In high school!”
“Oh, ain't we select since we went to that hen college! Let me tell you there isn't a private school in the state that's got as swell a bunch as we got in Gamma Digamma this year. There's two fellows that their dads are millionaires. Say, gee, I ought to have a car of my own, like lots of the fellows.” Babbitt almost rose. “A car of your own! Don't you want a yacht, and a house and lot? That pretty nearly takes the cake! A boy that can't pass his Latin examinations, like any other boy ought to, and he expects me to give him a motor-car, and I suppose a chauffeur, and an areoplane maybe, as a reward for the hard work he puts in going to the movies with Eunice Littlefield! Well, when you see me giving you — ”
Somewhat later, after diplomacies, Ted persuaded Verona to admit that she was merely going to the Armory, that evening, to see the dog and cat show. She was then, Ted planned, to park the car in front of the candy-store across from the Armory and he would pick it up. There were masterly arrangements regarding leaving the key, and having the gasoline tank filled; and passionately, devotees of the Great God Motor, they hymned the patch on the spare inner-tube, and the lost jack-handle.
Their truce dissolving, Ted observed that her friends were “a scream of a bunch-stuck-up gabby four-flushers.” His friends, she indicated, were “disgusting imitation sports, and horrid little shrieking ignorant girls.” Further: “It's disgusting of you to smoke cigarettes, and so on and so forth, and those clothes you've got on this morning, they're too utterly ridiculous — honestly, simply disgusting.”
Ted balanced over to the low beveled mirror in the buffet, regarded his charms, and smirked. His suit, the latest thing in Old Eli Togs, was skin-tight, with skimpy trousers to the tops of his glaring tan boots, a chorus-man waistline, pattern of an agitated check, and across the back a belt which belted nothing. His scarf was an enormous black silk wad. His flaxen hair was ice-smooth, pasted back without parting. When he went to school he would add a cap with a long vizor like a shovel-blade. Proudest of all was his waistcoat, saved for, begged for, plotted for; a real Fancy Vest of fawn with polka dots of a decayed red, the points astoundingly long. On the lower edge of it he wore a high-school button, a class button, and a fraternity pin.
And none of it mattered. He was supple and swift and flushed; his eyes (which he believed to be cynical) were candidly eager. But he was not over-gentle. He waved his hand at poor dumpy Verona and drawled: “Yes, I guess we're pretty ridiculous and disgusticulus, and I rather guess our new necktie is some smear!”
Babbitt barked: “It is! And while you're admiring yourself, let me tell you it might add to your manly beauty if you wiped some of that egg off your mouth!”
Verona giggled, momentary victor in the greatest of Great Wars, which is the family war. Ted looked at her hopelessly, then shrieked at Tinka: “For the love o' Pete, quit pouring the whole sugar bowl on your corn flakes!”
