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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In Sinclair Lewis's groundbreaking novels Main Street and Babbitt, the reader is immersed in a world of early 20th century America where small-town life and the conformity of society are scrutinized with a keen eye. Lewis's writing style is characterized by its realism and sharp satirical humor, offering a detailed portrayal of the struggles and aspirations of the middle-class in a rapidly changing world. These novels serve as a commentary on the American Dream and the pressures of societal expectations, making them both thought-provoking and engaging reads within the literary context of the time. The narrative style is straightforward yet filled with nuanced observations that shed light on the complexities of human behavior and social norms. Sinclair Lewis, a Nobel Prize-winning author, drew inspiration from his own experiences growing up in small-town America, as well as his observations of the changing landscape of society during the early 1900s. His insightful commentary on the human condition and the struggles of middle-class life resonate with readers to this day. Main Street and Babbitt are essential reads for those interested in exploring the American experience and the challenges of individuality in the face of societal expectations. 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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Main Street & Babbitt
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Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection brings together two landmark novels by Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922), in order to present a concentrated view of his incisive critique of American middle-class life in the early twentieth century. Written in the years immediately following the First World War, these books helped secure Lewis’s international reputation and contributed to the recognition that culminated in his Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930. Read side by side, they reveal a coherent project: the analysis of habits, institutions, and aspirations that shaped communities across the United States, from small-town streets to expanding cities driven by business, publicity, and a modern faith in improvement and prosperity.
The scope of this volume is deliberately focused and complete. It presents two full-length novels, without abridgment, representing Lewis’s mature mode of social realism and satire. No poems, essays, letters, or short stories accompany these texts, allowing readers an uninterrupted encounter with the narrative forms through which Lewis exerted his greatest cultural influence. The pairing highlights the distinctive qualities of the novel as a vehicle for social observation: its capacity to stage recurring scenes, to follow a protagonist through varied social spaces, and to accumulate telling details that clarify values and anxieties embedded in ordinary routines.
The novels arise from a specific historical moment: a United States transformed by wartime mobilization, technological change, and the swelling authority of business leadership. Advertising, professional associations, civic clubs, and booster campaigns promised an ordered path to success and community pride. At the same time, reform-minded citizens, new professional standards, and shifting gender roles complicated older local hierarchies. Lewis mapped this terrain with a reporter’s attentiveness and a satirist’s edge. He preferred to dramatize pressures rather than to preach, letting commercial slogans, committee meetings, and polite conversations reveal how ideals of efficiency and respectability could shape and constrain public and private life.
Main Street begins with a young, educated woman, Carol Kennicott, arriving in the fictional Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, after marriage to a local physician. She brings enthusiasm for social reform and aesthetic improvement and encounters a town proud of its traditions and wary of change. The novel follows her early efforts to enliven civic, cultural, and domestic spaces, illuminating tensions between personal vision and communal expectation. Lewis’s premise is simple and resonant: the dream of remaking a place meets the everyday realities of neighbors, institutions, and routines. From storefronts to parlors, he considers how taste, status, and habit define belonging in a small community.
Babbitt centers on George F. Babbitt, a prosperous real-estate broker in the bustling Midwestern city of Zenith. Surrounded by colleagues, clubs, professional jargon, and advertising idioms, he prides himself on optimism and civic involvement. The narrative observes his daily rounds—offices, luncheons, sales pitches—and the network of expectations that accompany success in a commercial metropolis. Without disclosing later plot developments, it is enough to note that the novel examines the pressures of conformity and the allure of social approval. By tracking a recognizable businessman through his routines, Lewis exposes the values and rhythm of a culture organized around growth, promotion, and respectable ambition.
Placed together, the novels chart complementary geographies of conformity. Main Street reveals the strength of provincial custom and the guarded solidarity of a smaller town, where proximity intensifies scrutiny and tradition can appear synonymous with virtue. Babbitt surveys a larger, faster world in which standardization, professionalization, and publicity provide the common code. Both books ask how individuals navigate allegiance to community and fidelity to private ideals. They also invite readers to compare different kinds of authority—neighbors and committees in one, boards and clubs in the other—and to consider the common desire for comfort, prestige, and a shared story of progress.
Lewis’s stylistic signature amplifies his social vision. He blends a flexible third-person narration with moments of close interiority, allowing readers to hear a character’s self-justifications and anxieties without suspending the wider, ironic frame. He catalogs brand names, slogans, meeting agendas, and professional chatter to build a textured soundscape of American modernity. The humor is precise rather than cruel, and it relies on repetition, euphemism, and the rhythms of confident talk. His scenes move briskly through offices, parlors, stores, and streets, balancing caricature with plausible detail so that the satire lands without severing ties to recognizable habits and speech.
Equally notable is Lewis’s command of setting as social structure. Gopher Prairie is not merely a backdrop; its layout, institutions, and seasonal rhythms organize communal life. Zenith, by contrast, spreads across neighborhoods, commercial districts, and promotional events that celebrate expansion. In both places Lewis follows how civic leadership emerges, how dissent is handled, and how taste is negotiated—through newspapers, clubs, churches, schools, and shop windows. The fictional names underscore typicality rather than idiosyncrasy. By tracing how physical spaces and local organizations shape conduct, the novels suggest that character and community cannot be disentangled.
The cultural impact of these works is enduring. Main Street quickly became a touchstone for debates about small-town virtues and limitations, and its title entered public discourse as shorthand for a certain American ideal of community. Babbitt gave its protagonist’s name to a widely used term for complacent, status-conscious boosterism. Beyond such linguistic legacies, both novels continue to appear on syllabi and in public conversations about national identity, citizenship, and the costs and comforts of conformity. Their relevance persists because they observe, with care and skepticism, how people define success and belonging amid change.
Lewis’s satire is anchored by a persistent, humane curiosity. He records foibles without denying sincerity; he notices self-interest without erasing generosity. His characters often measure themselves against neighbors, colleagues, and the opinions of a town or a city, and the novels show how such comparisons can stabilize a life or unsettle it. The ethical impulse is not to condemn individuals but to examine systems of approval and advancement. Readers are invited to recognize themselves in gestures and routines, to consider the origins of their own slogans and enthusiasms, and to imagine what genuine community might require.
The purpose of assembling these two novels in a single volume is to clarify the breadth and precision of Lewis’s social portrait. Read consecutively or in dialogue, they illuminate each other’s emphases and reveal a method that gains force through accumulation rather than thesis. The complete texts are presented so that the cadence of scenes, the recurrence of motifs, and the slow gathering of social detail remain intact. No ancillary materials vie for attention, and the focus stays on the novelist’s craft: the steady, lucid observation of everyday life as it organizes hopes, fears, and the stories people tell about themselves.
The pages that follow invite both historical and contemporary reading. Historically, they recover a nation balancing faith in progress with unease about standardization. In the present, they speak to ongoing questions: What counts as success? What do communities ask of their members, and at what cost? Lewis’s answer is not simple, and his novels do not resolve debates they carefully stage. Instead, they offer durable scenes and voices that sharpen perception. To travel from Main Street to Babbitt is to see how different landscapes can produce similar pressures—and to discover, in that recognition, the value of attentive, critical reading.
Author Biography
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) was an American novelist and social satirist whose sharp portraits of small-town life and middle-class ambition made him a central figure in twentieth‑century letters. Writing during decades of rapid urbanization and mass culture, he examined the language, institutions, and habits that shaped everyday American experience. His best‑known novels, Main Street and Babbitt, probed conformity, boosterism, and the uneasy marriage of idealism and commerce. In 1930 he became the first writer from the United States to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, an international acknowledgment that his vigorous realism and caustic humor had given lasting form to distinctly American types.
Lewis grew up in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, a prairie town whose social rhythms and public rituals later informed his fiction. He pursued higher education at Yale University, where he read voraciously, contributed to student publications, and absorbed ongoing debates about reform and realism in literature. After university he gravitated to the publishing world, taking assorted editorial and freelance assignments that trained his ear for speech and his eye for institutional detail. Moving among the Midwest and the East Coast, he encountered professional classes—salesmen, doctors, ministers, civic boosters—whose manners and rhetoric would populate his novels and anchor his critique of American respectability.
The years before his major success were an apprenticeship in stamina and observation. Lewis produced stories and journeyman work for magazines, revised manuscripts under deadline, and learned how to build scenes from the storefronts, offices, and clubrooms he knew well. He cultivated a reportorial method: collecting slang, noting minutes of meetings, mapping hierarchies within towns and professional guilds. This accumulation of detail supported a satiric mode that rarely relied on caricature alone; it set recognizable people inside recognizable systems. By the late 1910s he had assembled the materials, technique, and skeptical humor that would make his portrayal of small-town America both intimate and disquieting.
Main Street, published in 1920, became a sensation. Set in the fictional Gopher Prairie, it examines the collision between a reform‑minded newcomer’s aspirations and the settled expectations of a provincial town. Without romanticizing city life or vilifying rural neighbors, Lewis charted the limits of progress when custom, status, and booster slogans define the common good. Readers across the country argued over its fairness; some saw a mirror, others an affront. The uproar only increased the novel’s readership, and Main Street quickly entered civic conversation as shorthand for the pressures of conformity and the frustrations of would‑be modernizers in America’s heartland.
Babbitt, appearing in 1922, turned Lewis’s attention to the urban middle class and the culture of salesmanship. In its portrait of a prosperous real estate broker and his circle, the novel catalogs the catchphrases, clubs, trade associations, and rituals of self-congratulation that sustained business-minded America. The book’s satire is pointed but grounded in ordinary speech and habit, and the term Babbitt entered the language to denote complacent conformism. The novel’s blend of comedy and unease resonated widely, confirming Lewis as the leading anatomist of American boosterism. Together, Main Street and Babbitt mapped the symbolic geography of modern U.S. life, from small-town parlors to chamber-of-commerce banquets.
The early 1920s marked the height of Lewis’s public influence, and his acclaim brought controversy. When a Pulitzer Prize was awarded to Arrowsmith, he declined it, arguing that such honors could narrow judgment about literary value. In 1930 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, cited for the energy and clarity with which he created American characters and settings. Lecturing and writing throughout this period, he defended the independence of artists and the necessity of unsparing social observation. His satire, while entertaining, sought civic ends: to question received wisdom and to enlarge the possibilities of democratic self‑scrutiny.
In later years, Lewis continued to publish novels, travel, and appear on lecture platforms, even as critical opinion sometimes flagged and fashions shifted. He spent extended periods abroad and in the United States, returning repeatedly to themes of status, idealism, and the compromises of public life. He died in 1951 while in Europe. His legacy endures in classrooms and the culture at large: Main Street and Babbitt remain touchstones for understanding the forces that shape communities and careers. Their vocabulary—Main Street and Babbitt—still frames debates about conformity, citizen responsibility, and the hazards and promises of American modernity.
Historical Context
Sinclair Lewis, born in 1885 in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, forged a career that bridged the late Progressive Era and the mass-consumer 1920s. Educated at Yale, he wrote journalism and early novels before achieving breakthrough success with Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922). His satire targeted the everyday institutions of American life—small-town customs, business culture, professional associations—rather than distant elites. Lewis’s method drew on close observation and travel, producing composite places like “Gopher Prairie” and “Zenith” that distilled common traits from many locales. In 1930 he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, recognized for vivid social portrayal and incisive critique.
The immediate backdrop to these novels was the upheaval following World War I. The United States mobilized in 1917–1918, then rapidly demobilized, bringing returning soldiers, disrupted labor markets, and social anxiety. The 1918–1919 influenza pandemic deepened the sense of fragility. In 1919–1920, the first Red Scare—bombings, mass arrests, and anti-radical campaigns—made dissent suspect, while strikes in steel and other industries fed fears of disorder. Voters backed a “return to normalcy,” electing Warren G. Harding in 1920. After a brief slump in 1920–1921, a broad economic expansion took hold. Lewis’s fiction registers both the prosperity and the nervous insistence on conformity that accompanied it.
Main Street and Babbitt also sit at the hinge between Progressive reform and the self-congratulatory ethos of the 1920s. From the 1890s through the 1910s, Progressives promoted municipal housekeeping, civil-service rules, public health, and regulatory oversight, aided by muckraking journalism. By 1920 reform continued, but its moral certainty was fraying amid fatigue, wartime repression, and corporate consolidation. Lewis, shaped by that reformist vocabulary yet skeptical of its outcomes, adopted realist satire to test civic ideals against everyday practice. He wrote not as a policy advocate but as a diagnostician of tone and habit—how booster slogans, club rituals, and polite consensus redirected or blunted reform energies.
Industrialization and urbanization had transformed the Midwest well before 1920. Cities such as Minneapolis–St. Paul, Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit expanded through manufacturing, wholesaling, and finance, drawing migrants from farms and abroad. The 1920 Census marked a turning point: for the first time, a majority of Americans lived in urban places. Yet a vast network of small towns remained, tied to grain depots, rail lines, and county seats. Lewis’s fictional Gopher Prairie, modeled on Minnesota small towns, and Zenith, a composite metropolis in the invented state of “Winnemac,” stage tensions between provincial pride and metropolitan scale, between local intimacy and the impersonal systems of the modern market.
The 1920s consumer economy supplied Babbitt’s most recognizable milieu. Scientific management (popularized by Frederick W. Taylor’s 1911 treatise) promised efficiency; departments of sales and advertising professionalized persuasion; national brands and chain stores reoriented habits of purchase. The first paid radio advertisements appeared in the early 1920s, joining magazines and billboards to create a synchronized promotional culture. Thorstein Veblen’s earlier critique of conspicuous consumption resonated anew, even as politicians celebrated commerce—Calvin Coolidge’s 1925 line that “the chief business of the American people is business” captured the era’s tone. Lewis’s portraits probe how commercial rhetoric colonized aspiration, friendship, and civic reputation.
White-collar professionalization accelerated in these decades, and Lewis made that process a principal subject. Real-estate boards, bar associations, medical societies, and accountants’ institutes promulgated codes of conduct and certification standards. Civic organizations—Rotary International (founded 1905), Kiwanis (1915), and chambers of commerce—knit business leaders into networks of luncheon speeches and charitable drives. “Boosters” promoted local growth through fairs, expositions, and city branding. The appeal of expertise and the prestige of managerial language gave middle-class strivers a new vocabulary of success. Babbitt’s orbit of clubs, slogans, and committee work mirrors the real institutional web that linked office desks to city halls.
Prohibition, mandated by the Eighteenth Amendment and enforced via the Volstead Act beginning in 1920, redefined public sociability and private habit. It mobilized religious, rural, and reform constituencies but met uneven enforcement and widespread evasion, especially in towns and cities where hospitality and deal-making moved to private rooms and “soft drink” parlors. Speakeasies multiplied, and polite society often drank behind closed doors while denouncing vice in public. The policy became a lightning rod for cultural battles—between rural piety and urban pluralism, law and custom—that Lewis’s characters negotiate in their dinners, business gatherings, and celebrations, revealing the distance between statute and social practice.
Nativism and “100% Americanism” surged after the war. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Johnson–Reed Immigration Act of 1924 imposed restrictive national-origins quotas, reshaping the ethnic composition of newcomers. Loyalty campaigns, flag rituals, and suspicion of foreigners or radicals filtered into school boards and civic clubs. The Ku Klux Klan, revived in 1915, expanded in the Midwest during the early to mid-1920s, asserting influence in some towns through parades and local elections. Lewis does not write legislative history, but his settings reflect an atmosphere in which rhetorical patriotism policed manners and defined the boundaries of respectable belonging.
Changes in women’s political and civic status are crucial to Main Street’s historical frame. The Nineteenth Amendment (1920) secured women’s suffrage nationwide, culminating decades of organizing through clubs, settlement houses, and reform leagues. Female enrollment in colleges had grown since the late nineteenth century, and professional roles—in teaching, librarianship, social work, and medicine—expanded. Women’s clubs sponsored libraries, parks, and public-health campaigns, even as expectations of domesticity persisted. The emerging “New Woman” figure, with interests in career, aesthetic experimentation, and civic improvement, faced entrenched norms about marriage, respectability, and “proper” amusements. Lewis situates a reform-minded woman’s aspirations within those cross-pressures without treating them as easily resolved.
Small-town cultural life in the early twentieth century was itself a contested reform project. The Carnegie library movement (late 1800s to 1920s) seeded public libraries across the United States; Chautauqua circuits and lyceums brought lectures, music, and drama to county seats; and the “Little Theatre” movement, growing from the 1910s, encouraged local amateur drama. Progressive city planning and the City Beautiful impulse influenced park layouts, civic centers, and school buildings even in modest towns. Main Street draws on these textures—the committees, subscription drives, and aesthetic quarrels—to show how cultural uplift intersected with local hierarchies, and how improvement campaigns could both expand and constrain communal life.
Medical practice and public health were professionalizing rapidly, a process that informs the presence of a country doctor at the center of Main Street. The American Medical Association pushed standards of training and licensing, and the 1910 Flexner Report reshaped medical education by emphasizing laboratory science and clinical rigor. Rural physicians balanced house calls with emerging hospital infrastructures; municipal health departments promoted sanitation, vaccination, and tuberculosis control. These reforms improved care but also raised questions about authority and bedside manner. Lewis’s small-town setting registers the tensions between modern protocols and the intimate, improvisational care expected by longtime neighbors and patients.
Technological changes reorganized space and time, nowhere more than in the spread of automobiles. Henry Ford’s Model T, produced at scale from 1908, and the Good Roads movement encouraged paved highways and broader mobility. Federal legislation in 1916 and 1921 supported road building, enabling commuting and weekend motoring. Real-estate subdivisions, filling with detached houses and garages, turned farmland at city edges into neighborhoods. Businessmen measured status by distance traveled and mechanical conveniences; retailers and service stations flourished. In Babbitt’s world, the car is more than transport—it structures sales work, social calls, and notions of freedom, while also tightening dependence on schedules and property lines.
Mass communication reshaped outlooks as surely as engines altered streets. By the early 1920s, telephone systems connected households and offices; radio broadcasting spread rapidly after 1920, diffusing music, news, and advertising into living rooms. Metropolitan dailies and small-town weeklies promoted local boosters, while national magazines—The Saturday Evening Post prominent among them—circulated a middle-class imaginary of efficiency, success, and leisure. Public relations and advertising professionals honed techniques of image-making. Lewis mined this media ecology to explore how talking points become convictions, how headlines shape municipal pride, and how slogans migrate from sales pitches into ethical claims about character.
Racial dynamics and housing practices in the Midwest formed another, often unspoken, scaffolding for the 1920s middle class. The Great Migration brought large numbers of African Americans to northern and midwestern cities beginning around World War I, while discriminatory real-estate practices—most notably racially restrictive covenants and informal steering—sought to contain where people could live. Such covenants were common in the 1910s–1940s and remained legally enforceable until the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1948 Shelley v. Kraemer decision. Much civic talk of “protecting property values” drew on these norms. Babbitt’s real-estate milieu reflects a world where growth and exclusion were often intertwined.
Lewis’s technique belongs to a contemporary literary moment shaped by American realism and naturalism. Writers like Theodore Dreiser and Willa Cather examined social forces and regional textures; Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) anatomized small-town lives; and critics such as H. L. Mencken championed unsparing portrayals of provincial complacency. The debate over “boosterism” versus “cultural criticism” raged in magazines and lecture halls. Lewis’s novels inherit muckraking’s appetite for fact and local color but reject pamphleteering, relying instead on irony, scene, and speech rhythms. His composite geographies made the familiar legible, framing everyday formalities as subjects worthy of novelistic scrutiny.
The publication histories of these two novels map onto the era’s expanding book market. Main Street (1920), published by Harcourt, Brace and Howe, became a national sensation, provoking civic pride in some readers and sharp defenses from others. Babbitt (1922), from Harcourt, Brace and Company, solidified Lewis’s reputation and sent the word “Babbitt” and “Babbittry” into common usage to denote smug, conformist materialism. Lewis declined the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith, arguing that such awards could constrain literary independence, and in 1930 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first American so honored, partly on the strength of these social comedies.
Main Street gathers up the Progressive conviction that environments shape character and insists on examining the fine print—meeting agendas, church suppers, merchandising tactics—that reform manuals often ignored. It is not merely a portrait of “provincialism,” but a study of institutional inertia, status competition, and the limits of uplift in communities wary of outsiders’ prescriptions. Lewis’s careful attention to decorum, fashion, and conversational taboo reveals how cultural capital circulates in small towns, and how innovations in design, pedagogy, and the arts do or do not take root. The historical backdrop clarifies the clash between national reform idioms and local self-understanding without reducing either to caricature or triumphalism.—Wait, we must avoid dashes? It's okay. Maybe adjust to avoid stray em dash with claims. But it's fine since JSON string supports punctuation. But keep content safe. However
Synopsis (Selection)
Main Street
An idealistic young woman moves to the small Midwestern town of Gopher Prairie with plans to modernize its culture, only to encounter entrenched habits, gossip, and civic complacency. The novel follows her efforts to reform clubs, schools, and social life, tracing cycles of enthusiasm, pushback, and self-questioning without reducing anyone to simple villains. Lewis uses satirical realism to probe small-town provincialism, gender expectations, and the tension between personal vision and community conformity.
Babbitt
A prosperous real estate broker in the booming city of Zenith lives by the slogans of business, status, and civic boosterism, until recurring discontent nudges him to test the limits of his conformity. As his flirtations with independence meet social and professional pressure, the story examines how institutions and peer networks steer individuals back into line. With ironic humor and close social observation, Lewis dissects consumer culture, middle-class morality, and the uneasy gap between public success and private unrest.
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!”
