ating the long and slippery floor of
the grillroom under the eyes of the other guests and the too-attentive
waiters.

When they did venture, tables got in their way, and they sought to cover
embarrassment by heavy jocularity at the coatroom. As the girl handed
out their hats, they smiled at her, and hoped that she, a cool and
expert judge, would feel that they were gentlemen. They croaked at one
another, "Who owns the bum lid?" and "You take a good one, George; I'll
take what's left," and to the check-girl they stammered, "Better come
along, sister! High, wide, and fancy evening ahead!" All of them tried
to tip her, urging one another, "No! Wait! Here! I got it right here!"
Among them, they gave her three dollars.

XI

Flamboyantly smoking cigars they sat in a box at the burlesque show,
their feet up on the rail, while a chorus of twenty daubed, worried,
and inextinguishably respectable grandams swung their legs in the more
elementary chorus-evolutions, and a Jewish comedian made vicious fun of
Jews. In the entr'actes they met other lone delegates. A dozen of them
went in taxicabs out to Bright Blossom Inn, where the blossoms were
made of dusty paper festooned along a room low and stinking, like a
cow-stable no longer wisely used.

Here, whisky was served openly, in glasses. Two or three clerks, who
on pay-day longed to be taken for millionaires, sheepishly danced with
telephone-girls and manicure-girls in the narrow space between the
tables. Fantastically whirled the professionals, a young man in sleek
evening-clothes and a slim mad girl in emerald silk, with amber hair
flung up as jaggedly as flames. Babbitt tried to dance with her. He
shuffled along the floor, too bulky to be guided, his steps unrelated
to the rhythm of the jungle music, and in his staggering he would have
fallen, had she not held him with supple kindly strength. He was blind
and deaf from prohibition-era alcohol; he could not see the tables, the
faces. But he was overwhelmed by the girl and her young pliant warmth.

When she had firmly returned him to his group, he remembered, by a
connection quite untraceable, that his mother's mother had been Scotch,
and with head thrown back, eyes closed, wide mouth indicating ecstasy,
he sang, very slowly and richly, "Loch Lomond."

But that was the last of his mellowness and jolly companionship. The
man from Sparta said he was a "bum singer," and for ten minutes Babbitt
quarreled with him, in a loud, u