looking over her ledger, Mat Penniman craning around at his desk in the dark alcove, Stanley Graff sullenly expressionless — as a parvenu before the bleak propriety of his butler. He hated to expose his back to their laughter, and in his effort to be casually merry he stammered and was raucously friendly and oozed wretchedly out of the door.
But he forgot his misery when he saw from Smith Street the charms of Floral Heights; the roofs of red tile and green slate, the shining new sun-parlors, and the stainless walls.
III
He stopped to inform Howard Littlefield, his scholarly neighbor, that though the day had been springlike the evening might be cold. He went in to shout “Where are you?” at his wife, with no very definite desire to know where she was. He examined the lawn to see whether the furnace-man had raked it properly. With some satisfaction and a good deal of discussion of the matter with Mrs. Babbitt, Ted, and Howard Littlefield, he concluded that the furnace-man had not raked it properly. He cut two tufts of wild grass with his wife's largest dressmaking-scissors; he informed Ted that it was all nonsense having a furnace-man — “big husky fellow like you ought to do all the work around the house;” and privately he meditated that it was agreeable to have it known throughout the neighborhood that he was so prosperous that his son never worked around the house.
He stood on the sleeping-porch and did his day's exercises: arms out sidewise for two minutes, up for two minutes, while he muttered, “Ought take more exercise; keep in shape;” then went in to see whether his collar needed changing before dinner. As usual it apparently did not.
The Lettish-Croat maid, a powerful woman, beat the dinner-gong.
The roast of beef, roasted potatoes, and string beans were excellent this evening and, after an adequate sketch of the day's progressive weather-states, his four-hundred-and-fifty-dollar fee, his lunch with Paul Riesling, and the proven merits of the new cigar-lighter, he was moved to a benign, “Sort o' thinking about buyin, a new car. Don't believe we'll get one till next year, but still we might.”
Verona, the older daughter, cried, “Oh, Dad, if you do, why don't you get a sedan? That would be perfectly slick! A closed car is so much more comfy than an open one.”
“Well now, I don't know about that. I kind of like an open car. You get more fresh air that way.”
“Oh, shoot, that's just because you never tried a sedan. Let's get one. It's got a lot more class,” said Ted.
“A closed car does keep the clothes nicer,” from Mrs. Babbitt; “You don't get your hair blown all to pieces,” from Verona; “It's a lot sportier,” from Ted; and from Tinka, the youngest, “Oh, let's have a sedan! Mary Ellen's father has got one.” Ted wound up, “Oh, everybody's got a closed car now, except us!”
Babbitt faced them: “I guess you got nothing very terrible to complain about! Anyway, I don't keep a car just to enable you children to look like millionaires! And I like an open car, so you can put the top down on summer evenings and go out for a drive and get some good fresh air. Besides — A closed car costs more money.”
“Aw, gee whiz, if the Doppelbraus can afford a closed car, I guess we can!” prodded Ted.
“Humph! I make eight thousand a year to his seven! But I don't blow it all in and waste it and throw it around, the way he does! Don't believe in this business of going and spending a whole lot of money to show off and — ”
They went, with ardor and some thoroughness, into the matters of streamline bodies, hill-climbing power, wire wheels, chrome steel, ignition systems, and body colors. It was much more than a study of transportation. It was an aspiration for knightly rank. In the city of Zenith, in the barbarous twentieth century, a family's motor indicated its social rank as precisely as the grades of the peerage determined the rank of an English family — indeed, more precisely, considering the opinion of old county families upon newly created brewery barons and woolen-mill viscounts. The details of precedence were never officially determined. There was no court to decide whether the second son of a Pierce Arrow limousine should go in to dinner before the first son of a Buick roadster, but of their respective social importance there was no doubt; and where Babbitt as a boy had aspired to the presidency, his son Ted aspired to a Packard twin-six and an established position in the motored gentry.
The favor which Babbitt had won from his family by speaking of a new car evaporated as they realized that he didn't intend to buy one this year. Ted lamented, “Oh, punk! The old boat looks as if it'd had fleas and been scratching its varnish off.” Mrs. Babbitt said abstractedly, “Snoway talkcher father.” Babbitt raged, “If you're too much of a high-class gentleman, and you belong to the bon ton and so on, why, you needn't take the car out this evening.” Ted explained, “I didn't mean — ” and dinner dragged on with normal domestic delight to the inevitable point at which Babbitt protested, “Come, come now, we can't sit here all evening. Give the girl a chance to clear away the table.”
He was fretting, “What a family! I don't know how we all get to scrapping this way. Like to go off some place and be able to hear myself think.... Paul ... Maine ... Wear old pants, and loaf, and cuss.” He said cautiously to his wife, “I've been in correspondence with a man in New York — wants me to see him about a real-estate trade — may not come off till summer. Hope it doesn't break just when we and the Rieslings get ready to go to Maine. Be a shame if we couldn't make the trip there together. Well, no use worrying now.”
Verona escaped, immediately after dinner, with no discussion save an automatic “Why don't you ever stay home?” from Babbitt.
In the living-room, in a corner of the davenport, Ted settled down to his Home Study; plain geometry, Cicero, and the agonizing metaphors of Comus.
“I don't see why they give us this old-fashioned junk by Milton and Shakespeare and Wordsworth and all these has-beens,” he protested. “Oh, I guess I could stand it to see a show by Shakespeare, if they had swell scenery and put on a lot of dog, but to sit down in cold blood and READ 'em — These teachers — how do they get that way?”
Mrs. Babbitt, darning socks, speculated, “Yes, I wonder why. Of course I don't want to fly in the face of the professors and everybody, but I do think there's things in Shakespeare — not that I read him much, but when I was young the girls used to show me passages that weren't, really, they weren't at all nice.”
Babbitt looked up irritably from the comic strips in the Evening Advocate. They composed his favorite literature and art, these illustrated chronicles in which Mr. Mutt hit Mr. Jeff with a rotten egg, and Mother corrected Father's vulgarisms by means of a rolling-pin. With the solemn face of a devotee, breathing heavily through his open mouth, he plodded nightly through every picture, and during the rite he detested interruptions. Furthermore, he felt that on the subject of Shakespeare he wasn't really an authority. Neither the Advocate-Times, the Evening Advocate, nor the Bulletin of the Zenith Chamber of Commerce had ever had an editorial on the matter, and until one of them had spoken he found it hard to form an original opinion. But even at risk of floundering in strange bogs, he could not keep out of an open controversy.
“I'll tell you why you have to study Shakespeare and those. It's because they're required for college entrance, and that's all there is to it! Personally, I don't see myself why they stuck 'em into an up-to-date high-school system like we have in this state. Be a good deal better if you took Business English, and learned how to write an ad, or letters that would pull. But there it is, and there's no talk, argument, or discussion about it! Trouble with you, Ted, is you always want to do something different! If you're going to law-school — and you are! — I never had a chance to, but I'll see that you do — why, you'll want to lay in all the English and Latin you can get.”
“Oh
