ed
at him when he adequately explained that he hated a crumpled newspaper
as he hated a broken sales-contract. She was seventeen now. Her ambition
was to be a cinema actress. She did not merely attend the showing of
every "feature film;" she also read the motion-picture magazines,
those extraordinary symptoms of the Age of Pep-monthlies and weeklies
gorgeously illustrated with portraits of young women who had recently
been manicure girls, not very skilful manicure girls, and who, unless
their every grimace had been arranged by a director, could not have
acted in the Easter cantata of the Central Methodist Church; magazines
reporting, quite seriously, in "interviews" plastered with pictures of
riding-breeches and California bungalows, the views on sculpture and
international politics of blankly beautiful, suspiciously beautiful
young men; outlining the plots of films about pure prostitutes and
kind-hearted train-robbers; and giving directions for making bootblacks
into Celebrated Scenario Authors overnight.

These authorities Eunice studied. She could, she frequently did, tell
whether it was in November or December, 1905, that Mack Harker? the
renowned screen cowpuncher and badman, began his public career as
chorus man in "Oh, You Naughty Girlie." On the wall of her room, her
father reported, she had pinned up twenty-one photographs of actors. But
the signed portrait of the most graceful of the movie heroes she carried
in her young bosom.

Babbitt was bewildered by this worship of new gods, and he suspected
that Eunice smoked cigarettes. He smelled the cloying reek from
up-stairs, and heard her giggling with Ted. He never inquired. The
agreeable child dismayed him. Her thin and charming face was sharpened
by bobbed hair; her skirts were short, her stockings were rolled, and,
as she flew after Ted, above the caressing silk were glimpses of soft
knees which made Babbitt uneasy, and wretched that she should consider
him old. Sometimes, in the veiled life of his dreams, when the
fairy child came running to him she took on the semblance of Eunice
Littlefield.

Ted was motor-mad as Eunice was movie-mad.

A thousand sarcastic refusals did not check his teasing for a car of
his own. However lax he might be about early rising and the prosody of
Vergil, he was tireless in tinkering. With three other boys he bought a
rheumatic Ford chassis, built an amazing racer-body out of tin and pine,
went skidding round corners in the per