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.
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.”
