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
