These authorities Eunice studied. She could,
she frequently did, tell whether it was in November
or December, 1905, that Mack Harker? the renowned
screen cowpuncher and badman, began his public career
as chorus man in “Oh, You Naughty Girlie.”
On the wall of her room, her father reported, she
had pinned up twenty-one photographs of actors.
But the signed portrait of the most graceful of the
movie heroes she carried in her young bosom.
Babbitt was bewildered by this worship of new gods,
and he suspected that Eunice smoked cigarettes.
He smelled the cloying reek from up-stairs, and heard
her giggling with Ted. He never inquired.
The agreeable child dismayed him. Her thin and
charming face was sharpened by bobbed hair; her skirts
were short, her stockings were rolled, and, as she
flew after Ted, above the caressing silk were glimpses
of soft knees which made Babbitt uneasy, and wretched
that she should consider him old. Sometimes,
in the veiled life of his dreams, when the fairy child
came running to him she took on the semblance of Eunice
Littlefield.
Ted was motor-mad as Eunice was movie-mad.
A thousand sarcastic refusals did not check his teasing
for a car of his own. However lax he might be
about early rising and the prosody of Vergil, he was
tireless in tinkering. With three other boys he
bought a rheumatic Ford chassis, built an amazing
racer-body out of tin and pine, went skidding round
corners in the perilous craft, and sold it at a profit.
Babbitt gave him a motor-cycle, and every Saturday
afternoon, with seven sandwiches and a bottle of Coca-Cola
in his pockets, and Eunice perched eerily on the rumble
seat, he went roaring off to distant towns.
Usually Eunice and he were merely neighborhood chums,
and quarreled with a wholesome and violent lack of
delicacy; but now and then, after the color and scent
of a dance, they were silent together and a little
furtive, and Babbitt was worried.
Babbitt was an average father. He was affectionate,
bullying, opinionated, ignorant, and rather wistful.
Like most parents, he enjoyed the game of waiting
till the victim was clearly wrong, then virtuously
pouncing. He justified himself by croaking, “Well,
Ted’s mother spoils him. Got to be somebody
who tells him what’s what, and me, I’m
elected the goat. Because I try to bring him
up to be a real, decent, human being and not one of
these sapheads and lounge-lizards, of course they
all call me a grouch!”
Throughout, with the eternal human genius for arriving
by the worst possible routes at surprisingly tolerable
goals, Babbitt loved his son and warmed to his companionship
and would have sacrificed everything for him—if
he could have been sure of proper credit.
II
Ted was planning a party for his set in the Senior
Class.
