If he was frightened by Ted’s slackness, Babbitt
was not sufficiently frightened by Verona. She
was too safe. She lived too much in the neat
little airless room of her mind. Kenneth Escott
and she were always under foot. When they were
not at home, conducting their cautiously radical courtship
over sheets of statistics, they were trudging off to
lectures by authors and Hindu philosophers and Swedish
lieutenants.
“Gosh,” Babbitt wailed to his wife, as
they walked home from the Fogartys’ bridge-party,
“it gets me how Rone and that fellow can be so
poky. They sit there night after night, whenever
he isn’t working, and they don’t know
there’s any fun in the world. All talk and
discussion—Lord! Sitting there—sitting
there—night after night—not
wanting to do anything—thinking I’m
crazy because I like to go out and play a fist of
cards—sitting there—gosh!”
Then round the swimmer, bored by struggling through
the perpetual surf of family life, new combers swelled.
Babbitt’s father- and mother-in-law, Mr. and
Mrs. Henry T. Thompson, rented their old house in
the Bellevue district and moved to the Hotel Hatton,
that glorified boarding-house filled with widows, red-plush
furniture, and the sound of ice-water pitchers.
They were lonely there, and every other Sunday evening
the Babbitts had to dine with them, on fricasseed
chicken, discouraged celery, and cornstarch ice cream,
and afterward sit, polite and restrained, in the hotel
lounge, while a young woman violinist played songs
from the German via Broadway.
Then Babbitt’s own mother came down from Catawba
to spend three weeks.
She was a kind woman and magnificently uncomprehending.
She congratulated the convention-defying Verona on
being a “nice, loyal home-body without all these
Ideas that so many girls seem to have nowadays;”
and when Ted filled the differential with grease, out
of pure love of mechanics and filthiness, she rejoiced
that he was “so handy around the house—and
helping his father and all, and not going out with
the girls all the time and trying to pretend he was
a society fellow.”
Babbitt loved his mother, and sometimes he rather
liked her, but he was annoyed by her Christian Patience,
and he was reduced to pulpiness when she discoursed
about a quite mythical hero called “Your Father”:
“You won’t remember it, Georgie, you were
such a little fellow at the time—my, I
remember just how you looked that day, with your goldy
brown curls and your lace collar, you always were
such a dainty child, and kind of puny and sickly,
and you loved pretty things so much and the red tassels
on your little bootees and all—and Your
Father was taking us to church and a man stopped us
and said ’Major’—so many of
the neighbors used to call Your Father ‘Major;’
of course he was only a private in The War but everybody
