Chapter: THE towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of
steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as
silver rods. They were neither citadels nor churches, but frankly and
beautifully office-buildings.

The mist took pity on the fretted structures of earlier generations: the
Post Office with its shingle-tortured mansard, the red brick minarets
of hulking old houses, factories with stingy and sooted windows, wooden
tenements colored like mud. The city was full of such grotesqueries, but
the clean towers were thrusting them from the business center, and
on the farther hills were shining new houses, homes--they seemed--for
laughter and tranquillity.

Over a concrete bridge fled a limousine of long sleek hood and noiseless
engine. These people in evening clothes were returning from an all-night
rehearsal of a Little Theater play, an artistic adventure considerably
illuminated by champagne. Below the bridge curved a railroad, a maze
of green and crimson lights. The New York Flyer boomed past, and twenty
lines of polished steel leaped into the glare.

In one of the skyscrapers the wires of the Associated Press were closing
down. The telegraph operators wearily raised their celluloid eye-shades
after a night of talking with Paris and Peking. Through the building
crawled the scrubwomen, yawning, their old shoes slapping. The dawn mist
spun away. Cues of men with lunch-boxes clumped toward the immensity of
new factories, sheets of glass and hollow tile, glittering shops where
five thousand men worked beneath one roof, pouring out the honest wares
that would be sold up the Euphrates and across the veldt. The whistles
rolled out in greeting a chorus cheerful as the April dawn; the song of
labor in a city built--it seemed--for giants.


II

There was nothing of the giant in the aspect of the man who was
beginning to awaken on the sleeping-porch of a Dutch Colonial house in
that residential district of Zenith known as Floral Heights.

His name was George F. Babbitt. He was forty-six years old now, in
April, 1920, and he made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes
nor poetry, but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more
than people could afford to pay.

His large head was pink, his brown hair thin and dry. His face was
babyish in slumber, despite his wrinkles and the red spectacle-dents on
the slopes of his nose. He was not fat but he was exceedingly well fed;
his cheeks were pads, and the unroughened hand which lay helpless upon
the khaki-colored blanket was slightly puffy. He seemed prosperous,
extremely married and unromantic; and altogether unromantic appeared
this sleeping-porch, which looked on one sizable elm, two respectable
grass-plots, a cement driveway, and a corrugated iron garage. Yet
Babbitt was again dreaming of the fairy child, a dream more romantic
than scarlet pagodas by a silver sea.

For years the fairy child had come to him. Where others saw but Georgie
Babbitt, she discerned gallant youth. She waited for him, in the
darkness beyond mysterious groves. When at last he could slip away from
the crowded house he darted to her. His wife, his clamoring friends,
sought to follow, but he escaped, the girl fleet beside him, and they
crouched together on a shadowy hillside. She was so slim, so white, so
eager! She cried that he was gay and valiant, that she would wait for
him, that they would sail--

Rumble and bang of the milk-truck.

Babbitt moaned; turned over; struggled back toward his dream. He could
see only her face now, beyond misty waters. The furnace-man slammed the
basement door. A dog barked in the next yard. As Babbitt sank blissfully
into a dim warm tide, the paper-carrier went by whistling, and the
rolled-up Advocate thumped the front door. Babbitt roused, his stomach
constricted with alarm. As he relaxed, he was pierced by the familiar
and irritating rattle of some one cranking a Ford: snap-ah-ah,
snap-ah-ah, snap-ah-ah. Himself a pious motorist, Babbitt cranked with
the unseen driver, with him waited through taut hours for the roar of
the starting engine, with him agonized as the roar ceased and again
began the infernal patient snap-ah-ah--a round, flat sound, a shivering
cold-morning sound, a sound infuriating and inescapable. Not till the
rising voice of the motor told him that the Ford was moving was he
released from the panting tension. He glanced once at his favorite tree,
elm twigs against the gold patina of sky, and fumbled for sleep as for a
drug. He who had been a boy very credulous of life was no longer greatly
interested in the possible and improbable adventures of each new day.

He escaped from reality till the alarm-clock rang, at seven-twenty.


III

It was the best of nationally advertised and quantitatively produced
alarm-clocks, with all modern attachments, including cathedral chime,
intermittent alarm, and a phosphorescent dial. Babbitt was proud
of being awakened by such a rich device. Socially it was almost as
creditable as buying expensive cord tires.

He sulkily admitted now that there was no more escape, but he lay and
detested the grind of the real-estate business, and disliked his family,
and disliked himself for disliking them. The evening before, he had
played poker at Vergil Gunch's till midnight, and after such holidays
he was irritable before breakfast. It may have been the tremendous
home-brewed beer of the prohibition-era and the cigars to which that
beer enticed him; it may have been resentment of return from this fine,
bold man-world to a restricted region of wives and stenographers, and of
suggestions not to smoke so much.

From the bedroom beside the sleeping-porch, his wife's detestably
cheerful "Time to get up, Georgie boy," and the itchy sound, the brisk
and scratchy sound, of combing hairs out of a stiff brush.

He grunted; he dragged his thick legs, in faded baby-blue pajamas, from
under the khaki blanket; he sat on the edge of the cot, running his
fingers through his wild hair, while his plump feet mechanically felt
for his slippers. He looked regretfully at the blanket--forever a
suggestion to him of freedom and heroism. He had bought it for a camping
trip which had never come off. It symbolized gorgeous loafing, gorgeous
cursing, virile flannel shirts.

He creaked to his feet, groaning at the waves of pain which passed
behind his eyeballs. Though he waited for their scorching recurrence, he
looked blurrily out at the yard. It delighted him, as always; it was
the neat yard of a successful business man of Zenith, that is, it was
perfection, and made him also perfect. He regarded the corrugated
iron garage. For the three-hundred-and-sixty-fifth time in a year he
reflected, "No class to that tin shack. Have to build me a frame garage.
But by golly it's the only thing on the place that isn't up-to-date!"
While he stared he thought of a community garage for his acreage
development, Glen Oriole. He stopped puffing and jiggling. His arms were
akimbo. His petulant, sleep-swollen face was set in harder lines. He
suddenly seemed capable, an official, a man to contrive, to direct, to
get things done.

On the vigor of his idea he was carried down the hard, clean,
unused-looking hall into the bathroom.

Though the house was not large it had, like all houses on Floral
Heights, an altogether royal bathroom of porcelain and glazed tile and
metal sleek as silver. The towel-rack was a rod of clear glass set in
nickel. The tub was long enough for a Prussian Guard, and above the
set bowl was a sensational exhibit of tooth-brush holder, shaving-brush
holder, soap-dish, sponge-dish, and medicine-cabinet, so glittering and
so ingenious that they resembled an electrical instrument-board. But the
Babbitt whose god was Modern Appliances was not pleased. The air of the
bathroom was thick with the smell of a heathen toothpaste. "Verona been
at it again! 'Stead of sticking to Lilidol, like I've re-peat-ed-ly
asked her, she's gone and gotten some confounded stinkum stuff that
makes you sick!"

The bath-mat was wrinkled and the floor was wet. (His daughter Verona
eccentrically took baths in the morning, now and then.) He slipped on
the mat, and slid against the tub. He said "Damn!" Furiously he snatched
up his tube of shaving-cream, furiously he lathered, with a belligerent
slapping of the unctuous brush, furiously he raked his plump cheeks
with a safety-razor. It pulled. The blade was dull. He said,
"Damn--oh--oh--damn it!"

He hunted through the medicine-cabinet for a packet of new razor-blades
(reflecting, as invariably, "Be cheaper to buy one of these dinguses and
strop your own blades,") and when he discovered the packet, behind the
round box of bicarbonate of soda, he thought ill of his wife for putting
it there and very well of himself for not saying "Damn." But he did say
it, immediately afterward, when with wet and soap-slippery fingers he
tried to remove the horrible little envelope and crisp clinging oiled
paper from the new blade. Then there was the problem, oft-pondered,
never solved, of what to do with the old blade, which might imperil
the fingers of his young. As usual, he tossed it on top of the
medicine-cabinet, with a mental note that some day he must remove the
fifty or sixty other blades that were also temporarily, piled up there.
He finished his shaving in a growing testiness increased by his spinning
headache and by the emptiness in his stomach. When he was done, his
round face smooth and streamy and his eyes stinging from soapy water,
he reached for a towel. The family towels were wet, wet and clammy and
vile, all of them wet, he found, as he blindly snatched them--his
own face-towel, his wife's, Verona's, Ted's, Tinka's, and the lone
bath-towel with the huge welt of initial. Then George F. Babbitt did
a dismaying thing. He wiped his face on the guest-towel! It was a
pansy-embroidered trifle which always hung there to indicate that the
Babbitts were in the best Floral Heights society. No one had ever used
it. No guest had ever dared to. Guests secretively took a corner of the
nearest regular towel.

He was raging, "By golly, here they go and use up all the towels, every
doggone one of 'em, and they use 'em and get 'em all wet and sopping,
and never put out a dry one for me--of course, I'm the goat!--and then
I want one and--I'm the only person in the doggone house that's got
the slightest doggone bit of consideration for other people and
thoughtfulness and consider there may be others that may want to use the
doggone bathroom after me and consider--"

He was pitching the chill abominations into the bath-tub, pleased by
the vindictiveness of that desolate flapping sound; and in the midst his
wife serenely trotted in, observed serenely, "Why Georgie dear, what are
you doing? Are you going to wash out the towels? Why, you needn't wash
out the towels. Oh, Georgie, you didn't go and use the guest-towel, did
you?"

It is not recorded that he was able to answer.

For the first time in weeks he was sufficiently roused by his wife to
look at her.


IV

Myra Babbitt--Mrs. George F. Babbitt--was definitely mature. She had
creases from the corners of her mouth to the bottom of her chin, and her
plump neck bagged. But the thing that marked her as having passed the
line was that she no longer had reticences before her husband, and no
longer worried about not having reticences. She was in a petticoat now,
and corsets which bulged, and unaware of being seen in bulgy corsets.
She had become so dully habituated to married life that in her full
matronliness she was as sexless as an anemic nun. She was a good woman,
a kind woman, a diligent woman, but no one, save perhaps Tinka her
ten-year-old, was at all interested in her or entirely aware that she
was alive.

After a rather thorough discussion of all the domestic and social
aspects of towels she apologized to Babbitt for his having an alcoholic
headache; and he recovered enough to endure the search for a B.V.D.
undershirt which had, he pointed out, malevolently been concealed among
his clean pajamas.

He was fairly amiable in the conference on the brown suit.

"What do you think, Myra?" He pawed at the clothes hunched on a chair in
their bedroom, while she moved about mysteriously adjusting and patting
her petticoat and, to his jaundiced eye, never seeming to get on with
her dressing. "How about it? Shall I wear the brown suit another day?"

"Well, it looks awfully nice on you."

"I know, but gosh, it needs pressing."

"That's so. Perhaps it does."

"It certainly could stand being pressed, all right."

"Yes, perhaps it wouldn't hurt it to be pressed."

"But gee, the coat doesn't need pressing. No sense in having the whole
darn suit pressed, when the coat doesn't need it."

"That's so."

"But the pants certainly need it, all right. Look at them--look at those
wrinkles--the pants certainly do need pressing."

"That's so. Oh, Georgie, why couldn't you wear the brown coat with the
blue trousers we were wondering what we'd do with them?"

"Good Lord! Did you ever in all my life know me to wear the coat of
one suit and the pants of another? What do you think I am? A busted
bookkeeper?"

"Well, why don't you put on the dark gray suit to-day, and stop in at
the tailor and leave the brown trousers?"

"Well, they certainly need--Now where the devil is that gray suit? Oh,
yes, here we are."

He was able to get through the other crises of dressing with comparative
resoluteness and calm.

His first adornment was the sleeveless dimity B.V.D. undershirt, in
which he resembled a small boy humorlessly wearing a cheesecloth tabard
at a civic pageant. He never put on B.V.D.'s without thanking the God of
Progress that he didn't wear tight, long, old-fashioned undergarments,
like his father-in-law and partner, Henry Thompson. His second
embellishment was combing and slicking back his hair. It gave him a
tremendous forehead, arching up two inches beyond the former hair-line.
But most wonder-working of all was the donning of his spectacles.

There is character in spectacles--the pretentious tortoiseshell, the
meek pince-nez of the school teacher, the twisted silver-framed glasses
of the old villager. Babbitt's spectacles had huge, circular, frameless
lenses of the very best glass; the ear-pieces were thin bars of gold. In
them he was the modern business man; one who gave orders to clerks and
drove a car and played occasional golf and was scholarly in regard to
Salesmanship. His head suddenly appeared not babyish but weighty, and
you noted his heavy, blunt nose, his straight mouth and thick, long
upper lip, his chin overfleshy but strong; with respect you beheld him
put on the rest of his uniform as a Solid Citizen.

The gray suit was well cut, well made, and completely undistinguished.
It was a standard suit. White piping on the V of the vest added a flavor
of law and learning. His shoes were black laced boots, good boots,
honest boots, standard boots, extraordinarily uninteresting boots.
The only frivolity was in his purple knitted scarf. With considerable
comment on the matter to Mrs. Babbitt (who, acrobatically fastening the
back of her blouse to her skirt with a safety-pin, did not hear a word
he said), he chose between the purple scarf and a tapestry effect
with stringless brown harps among blown palms, and into it he thrust a
snake-head pin with opal eyes.

A sensational event was changing from the brown suit to the gray the
contents of his pockets. He was earnest about these objects. They were
of eternal importance, like baseball or the Republican Party. They
included a fountain pen and a silver pencil (always lacking a supply of
new leads) which belonged in the righthand upper vest pocket. Without
them he would have felt naked. On his watch-chain were a gold penknife,
silver cigar-cutter, seven keys (the use of two of which he had
forgotten), and incidentally a good watch. Depending from the chain was
a large, yellowish elk's-tooth-proclamation of his membership in the
Brotherly and Protective Order of Elks. Most significant of all was his
loose-leaf pocket note-book, that modern and efficient note-book
which contained the addresses of people whom he had forgotten, prudent
memoranda of postal money-orders which had reached their destinations
months ago, stamps which had lost their mucilage, clippings of verses by
T. Cholmondeley Frink and of the newspaper editorials from which Babbitt
got his opinions and his polysyllables, notes to be sure and do things
which he did not intend to do, and one curious inscription--D.S.S.
D.M.Y.P.D.F.

But he had no cigarette-case. No one had ever happened to give him
one, so he hadn't the habit, and people who carried cigarette-cases he
regarded as effeminate.

Last, he stuck in his lapel the Boosters' Club button. With the
conciseness of great art the button displayed two words: "Boosters-Pep!"
It made Babbitt feel loyal and important. It associated him with Good
Fellows, with men who were nice and human, and important in business
circles. It was his V.C., his Legion of Honor ribbon, his Phi Beta Kappa
key.

With the subtleties of dressing ran other complex worries. "I feel kind
of punk this morning," he said. "I think I had too much dinner last
evening. You oughtn't to serve those heavy banana fritters."

"But you asked me to have some."

"I know, but--I tell you, when a fellow gets past forty he has to look
after his digestion. There's a lot of fellows that don't take proper
care of themselves. I tell you at forty a man's a fool or his doctor--I
mean, his own doctor. Folks don't give enough attention to this matter
of dieting. Now I think--Course a man ought to have a good meal after
the day's work, but it would be a good thing for both of us if we took
lighter lunches."

"But Georgie, here at home I always do have a light lunch."

"Mean to imply I make a hog of myself, eating down-town? Yes, sure!
You'd have a swell time if you had to eat the truck that new steward
hands out to us at the Athletic Club! But I certainly do feel out of
sorts, this morning. Funny, got a pain down here on the left side--but
no, that wouldn't be appendicitis, would it? Last night, when I was
driving over to Verg Gunch's, I felt a pain in my stomach, too. Right
here it was--kind of a sharp shooting pain. I--Where'd that dime go to?
Why don't you serve more prunes at breakfast? Of course I eat an apple
every evening--an apple a day keeps the doctor away--but still, you
ought to have more prunes, and not all these fancy doodads."

"The last time I had prunes you didn't eat them."

"Well, I didn't feel like eating 'em, I suppose. Matter of fact, I think
I did eat some of 'em. Anyway--I tell you it's mighty important to--I
was saying to Verg Gunch, just last evening, most people don't take
sufficient care of their diges--"

"Shall we have the Gunches for our dinner, next week?"

"Why sure; you bet."

"Now see here, George: I want you to put on your nice dinner-jacket that
evening."

"Rats! The rest of 'em won't want to dress."

"Of course they will. You remember when you didn't dress for the
Littlefields' supper-party, and all the rest did, and how embarrassed
you were."

"Embarrassed, hell! I wasn't embarrassed. Everybody knows I can put
on as expensive a Tux. as anybody else, and I should worry if I don't
happen to have it on sometimes. All a darn nuisance, anyway. All right
for a woman, that stays around the house all the time, but when a
fellow's worked like the dickens all day, he doesn't want to go and
hustle his head off getting into the soup-and-fish for a lot of folks
that he's seen in just reg'lar ordinary clothes that same day."

"You know you enjoy being seen in one. The other evening you admitted
you were glad I'd insisted on your dressing. You said you felt a lot
better for it. And oh, Georgie, I do wish you wouldn't say 'Tux.' It's
'dinner-jacket.'"

"Rats, what's the odds?"

"Well, it's what all the nice folks say. Suppose Lucile McKelvey heard
you calling it a 'Tux.'"

"Well, that's all right now! Lucile McKelvey can't pull anything on
me! Her folks are common as mud, even if her husband and her dad are
millionaires! I suppose you're trying to rub in your exalted social
position! Well, let me tell you that your revered paternal ancestor,
Henry T., doesn't even call it a 'Tux.'! He calls it a 'bobtail jacket
for a ringtail monkey,' and you couldn't get him into one unless you
chloroformed him!"

"Now don't be horrid, George."

"Well, I don't want to be horrid, but Lord! you're getting as fussy as
Verona. Ever since she got out of college she's been too rambunctious
to live with--doesn't know what she wants--well, I know what she
wants!--all she wants is to marry a millionaire, and live in Europe,
and hold some preacher's hand, and simultaneously at the same time stay
right here in Zenith and be some blooming kind of a socialist agitator
or boss charity-worker or some damn thing! Lord, and Ted is just as bad!
He wants to go to college, and he doesn't want to go to college.
Only one of the three that knows her own mind is Tinka. Simply can't
understand how I ever came to have a pair of shillyshallying children
like Rone and Ted. I may not be any Rockefeller or James J. Shakespeare,
but I certainly do know my own mind, and I do keep right on plugging
along in the office and--Do you know the latest? Far as I can figure
out, Ted's new bee is he'd like to be a movie actor and--And here I've
told him a hundred times, if he'll go to college and law-school and
make good, I'll set him up in business and--Verona just exactly as bad.
Doesn't know what she wants. Well, well, come on! Aren't you ready yet?
The girl rang the bell three minutes ago."


V

Before he followed his wife, Babbitt stood at the westernmost window of
their room. This residential settlement, Floral Heights, was on a rise;
and though the center of the city was three miles away--Zenith had
between three and four hundred thousand inhabitants now--he could see
the top of the Second National Tower, an Indiana limestone building of
thirty-five stories.

Its shining walls rose against April sky to a simple cornice like a
streak of white fire. Integrity was in the tower, and decision. It
bore its strength lightly as a tall soldier. As Babbitt stared,
the nervousness was soothed from his face, his slack chin lifted in
reverence. All he articulated was "That's one lovely sight!" but he was
inspired by the rhythm of the city; his love of it renewed. He beheld
the tower as a temple-spire of the religion of business, a faith
passionate, exalted, surpassing common men; and as he clumped down to
breakfast he whistled the ballad "Oh, by gee, by gosh, by jingo" as
though it were a hymn melancholy and noble.





RELIEVED of Babbitt's bumbling and the soft grunts with which his wife
expressed the sympathy she was too experienced to feel and much
too experienced not to show, their bedroom settled instantly into
impersonality.

It gave on the sleeping-porch. It served both of them as dressing-room,
and on the coldest nights Babbitt luxuriously gave up the duty of being
manly and retreated to the bed inside, to curl his toes in the warmth
and laugh at the January gale.

The room displayed a modest and pleasant color-scheme, after one of the
best standard designs of the decorator who "did the interiors" for most
of the speculative-builders' houses in Zenith. The walls were gray, the
woodwork white, the rug a serene blue; and very much like mahogany was
the furniture--the bureau with its great clear mirror, Mrs. Babbitt's
dressing-table with toilet-articles of almost solid silver, the plain
twin beds, between them a small table holding a standard electric
bedside lamp, a glass for water, and a standard bedside book
with colored illustrations--what particular book it was cannot be
ascertained, since no one had ever opened it. The mattresses were firm
but not hard, triumphant modern mattresses which had cost a great deal
of money; the hot-water radiator was of exactly the proper scientific
surface for the cubic contents of the room. The windows were large
and easily opened, with the best catches and cords, and Holland
roller-shades guaranteed not to crack. It was a masterpiece among
bedrooms, right out of Cheerful Modern Houses for Medium Incomes. Only
it had nothing to do with the Babbitts, nor with any one else. If people
had ever lived and loved here, read thrillers at midnight and lain in
beautiful indolence on a Sunday morning, there were no signs of it. It
had the air of being a very good room in a very good hotel. One expected
the chambermaid to come in and make it ready for people who would stay
but one night, go without looking back, and never think of it again.

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.


II

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."

"What do you mean 'worth while'? If you get to be Gruensberg's
secretary--and maybe you would, if you kept up your shorthand and didn't
go sneaking off to concerts and talkfests every evening--I guess you'll
find thirty-five or forty bones a week worth while!"

"I know, but--oh, I want to--contribute--I wish I were working in a
settlement-house. I wonder if I could get one of the department-stores
to let me put in a welfare-department with a nice rest-room and chintzes
and wicker chairs and so on and so forth. Or I could--"

"Now you look here! The first thing you got to understand is that all
this uplift and flipflop and settlement-work and recreation is nothing
in God's world but the entering wedge for socialism. The sooner a man
learns he isn't going to be coddled, and he needn't expect a lot of free
grub and, uh, all these free classes and flipflop and doodads for his
kids unless he earns 'em, why, the sooner he'll get on the job and
produce--produce--produce! That's what the country needs, and not all
this fancy stuff that just enfeebles the will-power of the working man
and gives his kids a lot of notions above their class. And you--if you'd
tend to business instead of fooling and fussing--All the time! When I
was a young man I made up my mind what I wanted to do, and stuck to it
through thick and thin, and that's why I'm where I am to-day, and--Myra!
What do you let the girl chop the toast up into these dinky little
chunks for? Can't get your fist onto 'em. Half cold, anyway!"

Ted Babbitt, junior in the great East Side High School, had been making
hiccup-like sounds of interruption. He blurted now, "Say, Rone, you
going to--"

Verona whirled. "Ted! Will you kindly not interrupt us when we're
talking about serious matters!"

"Aw punk," said Ted judicially. "Ever since somebody slipped up and let
you out of college, Ammonia, you been pulling these nut conversations
about what-nots and so-on-and-so-forths. Are you going to--I want to use
the car tonight."

Babbitt snorted, "Oh, you do! May want it myself!" Verona protested,
"Oh, you do, Mr. Smarty! I'm going to take it myself!" Tinka wailed,
"Oh, papa, you said maybe you'd drive us down to Rosedale!" and Mrs.
Babbitt, "Careful, Tinka, your sleeve is in the butter." They glared,
and Verona hurled, "Ted, you're a perfect pig about the car!"

"Course you're not! Not a-tall!" Ted could be maddeningly bland. "You
just want to grab it off, right after dinner, and leave it in front of
some skirt's house all evening while you sit and gas about lite'ature
and the highbrows you're going to marry--if they only propose!"

"Well, Dad oughtn't to EVER let you have it! You and those beastly Jones
boys drive like maniacs. The idea of your taking the turn on Chautauqua
Place at forty miles an hour!"

"Aw, where do you get that stuff! You're so darn scared of the car that
you drive up-hill with the emergency brake on!"

"I do not! And you--Always talking about how much you know about motors,
and Eunice Littlefield told me you said the battery fed the generator!"

"You--why, my good woman, you don't know a generator from a
differential." Not unreasonably was Ted lofty with her. He was a natural
mechanic, a maker and tinkerer of machines; he lisped in blueprints for
the blueprints came.

"That'll do now!" Babbitt flung in mechanically, as he lighted the
gloriously satisfying first cigar of the day and tasted the exhilarating
drug of the Advocate-Times headlines.

Ted negotiated: "Gee, honest, Rone, I don't want to take the old boat,
but I promised couple o' girls in my class I'd drive 'em down to
the rehearsal of the school chorus, and, gee, I don't want to, but a
gentleman's got to keep his social engagements."

"Well, upon my word! You and your social engagements! In high school!"

"Oh, ain't we select since we went to that hen college! Let me tell you
there isn't a private school in the state that's got as swell a bunch as
we got in Gamma Digamma this year. There's two fellows that their dads
are millionaires. Say, gee, I ought to have a car of my own, like lots
of the fellows." Babbitt almost rose. "A car of your own! Don't you want
a yacht, and a house and lot? That pretty nearly takes the cake! A boy
that can't pass his Latin examinations, like any other boy ought to, and
he expects me to give him a motor-car, and I suppose a chauffeur, and an
areoplane maybe, as a reward for the hard work he puts in going to the
movies with Eunice Littlefield! Well, when you see me giving you--"

Somewhat later, after diplomacies, Ted persuaded Verona to admit that
she was merely going to the Armory, that evening, to see the dog and
cat show. She was then, Ted planned, to park the car in front of the
candy-store across from the Armory and he would pick it up. There were
masterly arrangements regarding leaving the key, and having the gasoline
tank filled; and passionately, devotees of the Great God Motor, they
hymned the patch on the spare inner-tube, and the lost jack-handle.


Their truce dissolving, Ted observed that her friends were "a scream of
a bunch-stuck-up gabby four-flushers." His friends, she indicated,
were "disgusting imitation sports, and horrid little shrieking ignorant
girls." Further: "It's disgusting of you to smoke cigarettes, and so on
and so forth, and those clothes you've got on this morning, they're too
utterly ridiculous--honestly, simply disgusting."

Ted balanced over to the low beveled mirror in the buffet, regarded his
charms, and smirked. His suit, the latest thing in Old Eli Togs, was
skin-tight, with skimpy trousers to the tops of his glaring tan boots, a
chorus-man waistline, pattern of an agitated check, and across the back
a belt which belted nothing. His scarf was an enormous black silk wad.
His flaxen hair was ice-smooth, pasted back without parting. When he
went to school he would add a cap with a long vizor like a shovel-blade.
Proudest of all was his waistcoat, saved for, begged for, plotted for;
a real Fancy Vest of fawn with polka dots of a decayed red, the points
astoundingly long. On the lower edge of it he wore a high-school button,
a class button, and a fraternity pin.

And none of it mattered. He was supple and swift and flushed; his eyes
(which he believed to be cynical) were candidly eager. But he was not
over-gentle. He waved his hand at poor dumpy Verona and drawled: "Yes, I
guess we're pretty ridiculous and disgusticulus, and I rather guess our
new necktie is some smear!"

Babbitt barked: "It is! And while you're admiring yourself, let me tell
you it might add to your manly beauty if you wiped some of that egg off
your mouth!"

Verona giggled, momentary victor in the greatest of Great Wars, which
is the family war. Ted looked at her hopelessly, then shrieked at Tinka:
"For the love o' Pete, quit pouring the whole sugar bowl on your corn
flakes!"

When Verona and Ted were gone and Tinka upstairs, Babbitt groaned to his
wife: "Nice family, I must say! I don't pretend to be any baa-lamb, and
maybe I'm a little cross-grained at breakfast sometimes, but the way
they go on jab-jab-jabbering, I simply can't stand it. I swear, I feel
like going off some place where I can get a little peace. I do think
after a man's spent his lifetime trying to give his kids a chance and
a decent education, it's pretty discouraging to hear them all the time
scrapping like a bunch of hyenas and never--and never--Curious; here
in the paper it says--Never silent for one mom--Seen the morning paper
yet?"

"No, dear." In twenty-three years of married life, Mrs. Babbitt had seen
the paper before her husband just sixty-seven times.

"Lots of news. Terrible big tornado in the South. Hard luck, all right.
But this, say, this is corking! Beginning of the end for those fellows!
New York Assembly has passed some bills that ought to completely outlaw
the socialists! And there's an elevator-runners' strike in New York and
a lot of college boys are taking their places. That's the stuff! And
a mass-meeting in Birmingham's demanded that this Mick agitator, this
fellow De Valera, be deported. Dead right, by golly! All these agitators
paid with German gold anyway. And we got no business interfering with
the Irish or any other foreign government. Keep our hands strictly off.
And there's another well-authenticated rumor from Russia that Lenin is
dead. That's fine. It's beyond me why we don't just step in there and
kick those Bolshevik cusses out."

"That's so," said Mrs. Babbitt.

"And it says here a fellow was inaugurated mayor in overalls--a
preacher, too! What do you think of that!"

"Humph! Well!"

He searched for an attitude, but neither as a Republican, a
Presbyterian, an Elk, nor a real-estate broker did he have any doctrine
about preacher-mayors laid down for him, so he grunted and went on. She
looked sympathetic and did not hear a word. Later she would read the
headlines, the society columns, and the department-store advertisements.

"What do you know about this! Charley McKelvey still doing the sassiety
stunt as heavy as ever. Here's what that gushy woman reporter says about
last night:"


Never is Society with the big, big S more flattered than when they are
bidden to partake of good cheer at the distinguished and hospitable
residence of Mr. and Mrs. Charles L. McKelvey as they were last night.
Set in its spacious lawns and landscaping, one of the notable sights
crowning Royal Ridge, but merry and homelike despite its mighty stone
walls and its vast rooms famed for their decoration, their home was
thrown open last night for a dance in honor of Mrs. McKelvey's notable
guest, Miss J. Sneeth of Washington. The wide hall is so generous in
its proportions that it made a perfect ballroom, its hardwood floor
reflecting the charming pageant above its polished surface. Even
the delights of dancing paled before the alluring opportunities for
tete-a-tetes that invited the soul to loaf in the long library before
the baronial fireplace, or in the drawing-room with its deep comfy
armchairs, its shaded lamps just made for a sly whisper of pretty
nothings all a deux; or even in the billiard room where one could take
a cue and show a prowess at still another game than that sponsored by
Cupid and Terpsichore.


There was more, a great deal more, in the best urban journalistic
style of Miss Elnora Pearl Bates, the popular society editor of the
Advocate-Times. But Babbitt could not abide it. He grunted. He wrinkled
the newspaper. He protested: "Can you beat it! I'm willing to hand a lot
of credit to Charley McKelvey. When we were in college together, he was
just as hard up as any of us, and he's made a million good bucks out
of contracting and hasn't been any dishonester or bought any more city
councils than was necessary. And that's a good house of his--though it
ain't any 'mighty stone walls' and it ain't worth the ninety thousand
it cost him. But when it comes to talking as though Charley McKelvey
and all that booze-hoisting set of his are any blooming bunch of of, of
Vanderbilts, why, it makes me tired!"

Timidly from Mrs. Babbitt: "I would like to see the inside of their
house though. It must be lovely. I've never been inside."

"Well, I have! Lots of--couple of times. To see Chaz about business
deals, in the evening. It's not so much. I wouldn't WANT to go there to
dinner with that gang of, of high-binders. And I'll bet I make a whole
lot more money than some of those tin-horns that spend all they got on
dress-suits and haven't got a decent suit of underwear to their name!
Hey! What do you think of this!"

Mrs. Babbitt was strangely unmoved by the tidings from the Real Estate
and Building column of the Advocate-Times:

     Ashtabula Street, 496--J. K. Dawson to
     Thomas Mullally, April 17, 15.7 X 112.2,
     mtg. $4000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nom

And this morning Babbitt was too disquieted to entertain her with items
from Mechanics' Liens, Mortgages Recorded, and Contracts Awarded. He
rose. As he looked at her his eyebrows seemed shaggier than usual.
Suddenly:

"Yes, maybe--Kind of shame to not keep in touch with folks like the
McKelveys. We might try inviting them to dinner, some evening. Oh,
thunder, let's not waste our good time thinking about 'em! Our little
bunch has a lot liver times than all those plutes. Just compare a real
human like you with these neurotic birds like Lucile McKelvey--all
highbrow talk and dressed up like a plush horse! You're a great old
girl, hon.!"

He covered his betrayal of softness with a complaining: "Say, don't let
Tinka go and eat any more of that poison nutfudge. For Heaven's sake,
try to keep her from ruining her digestion. I tell you, most folks don't
appreciate how important it is to have a good digestion and regular
habits. Be back 'bout usual time, I guess."

He kissed her--he didn't quite kiss her--he laid unmoving lips against
her unflushing cheek. He hurried out to the garage, muttering: "Lord,
what a family! And now Myra is going to get pathetic on me because we
don't train with this millionaire outfit. Oh, Lord, sometimes I'd like
to quit the whole game. And the office worry and detail just as bad. And
I act cranky and--I don't mean to, but I get--So darn tired!"

 The first chapter begins with a description of Zenith where the towers, 'aspired above the morning mist ...'. This city appears to have been built 'for giants'. There is a shift of focus to the eponymous hero, George F. Babbitt, who has been asleep on the sleeping-porch and is described as such: 'There was nothing of the giant in the aspect of the man.' It is April 1920 and he is 46 years old. He lives in the Floral Heights district of Zenith and he sells houses for a living. His physical description is also given and is depicted as having a large pink head, with thin and dry brown hair. He has been dreaming of the fairy child again: 'When others saw but Georgie Babbitt, she discerned gallant youth'. He escapes from reality until the alarm clock goes off; once awake he has no excitement for the forthcoming day as he did as a boy. His alarm clock is described as it would be in an advertisement. His children Verona, Ted and Tinka are then introduced and his God is described as 'Modern Appliances'. His wife, Myra, is portrayed as 'dully habituated to married life' and the consequence is that she has become as 'sexless as an anaemic nun'. His father-in-law and business partner, Henry T. Thompson is also briefly mentioned. The narrative proceeds to follow Babbitt's morning ablutions and dressing for work. He puts on his elk's tooth , which symbolizes his membership of the Order of the Elks, and his Boosters' Club button, which makes him feel 'loyal and important'. Babbitt talks about looking after himself and tells Myra she should serve prunes for breakfast. She corrects him for saying 'tux' instead of dinner jacket. After saying her father does not even call it a 'tux' , he goes on to fret about Ted and Verona. Verona has finished college and Ted is due to go. Babbitt is worried that neither knows what they want to do for a career. This first chapter ends with Babbitt looking at Zenith and the Second National Tower: 'He beheld the tower as a temple-spire of the religion of business, a faith passionate, exalted, surpassing common men; ....' . Chapter Two begins with a description of the Babbitt bedroom and the articles in it. There is a book on the bedside table that has never been opened. The impersonality of the room is emphasized and it is compared to a room in 'a very good hotel'. We are told that the only thing wrong with the house is that it is not a home. The scene shifts to the breakfast table and the three children are described in a little more detail. Verona is 22 and has just finished at Bryn Mawr; she is also 'dumpy brown-haired' and is working as a filing clerk. However, she wants to do something 'worth while' for charity. Babbitt is against the idea of charity as he believes it stops a man looking for work. Ted is 17 and his full name is Theodore Roosevelt Babbitt. Tinka's actual name is Katherine and she is aged 10. Ted and Verona begin to argue about which of them will have the car that night and Ted says he should have one of his own. He also relates how the fathers of two of his classmates are millionaires and these boys have their own car. As Babbitt reads snippets of the newspaper to his wife he reveals his anti-socialist values in more detail. We are told he is 'a Republican, a Presbytarian, an Elk'. He goes on to read about Charles McKelvey who is now a millionaire, but was not when Babbitt was at college with him. Myra says she would like to see inside his home and Babbitt suggests they invite the McKelveys to dinner one evening. This second chapter ends with Babbitt muttering to himself that he would 'like to quit the whole game' and regrets being 'cranky' with his wife and children.

