He solemnly finished the last copy of the American
Magazine, while his wife sighed, laid away her darning,
and looked enviously at the lingerie designs in a
women’s magazine. The room was very still.
It was a room which observed the best Floral Heights
standards. The gray walls were divided into artificial
paneling by strips of white-enameled pine. From
the Babbitts’ former house had come two much-carved
rocking-chairs, but the other chairs were new, very
deep and restful, upholstered in blue and gold-striped
velvet. A blue velvet davenport faced the fireplace,
and behind it was a cherrywood table and a tall piano-lamp
with a shade of golden silk. (Two out of every three
houses in Floral Heights had before the fireplace
a davenport, a mahogany table real or imitation, and
a piano-lamp or a reading-lamp with a shade of yellow
or rose silk.)
On the table was a runner of gold-threaded Chinese
fabric, four magazines, a silver box containing cigarette-crumbs,
and three “gift-books”—large,
expensive editions of fairy-tales illustrated by English
artists and as yet unread by any Babbitt save Tinka.
In a corner by the front windows was a large cabinet
Victrola. (Eight out of every nine Floral Heights
houses had a cabinet phonograph.)
Among the pictures, hung in the exact center of each
gray panel, were a red and black imitation English
hunting-print, an anemic imitation boudoir-print with
a French caption of whose morality Babbitt had always
been rather suspicious, and a “hand-colored”
photograph of a Colonial room—rag rug,
maiden spinning, cat demure before a white fireplace.
(Nineteen out of every twenty houses in Floral Heights
had either a hunting-print, a Madame Feit la Toilette
print, a colored photograph of a New England house,
a photograph of a Rocky Mountain, or all four.)
It was a room as superior in comfort to the “parlor”
of Babbitt’s boyhood as his motor was superior
to his father’s buggy. Though there was
nothing in the room that was interesting, there was
nothing that was offensive. It was as neat, and
as negative, as a block of artificial ice. The
fireplace was unsoftened by downy ashes or by sooty
brick; the brass fire-irons were of immaculate polish;
and the grenadier andirons were like samples in a
shop, desolate, unwanted, lifeless things of commerce.
Against the wall was a piano, with another piano-lamp,
but no one used it save Tinka. The hard briskness
of the phonograph contented them; their store of jazz
records made them feel wealthy and cultured; and all
they knew of creating music was the nice adjustment
of a bamboo needle. The books on the table were
unspotted and laid in rigid parallels; not one corner
of the carpet-rug was curled; and nowhere was there
a hockey-stick, a torn picture-book, an old cap, or
a gregarious and disorganizing dog.
