on, when he was not
helping Matilda with the Vecchia ice cream and the petits fours. He was
deeply disquieted. Eight years ago, when Verona had given a high-school
party, the children had been featureless gabies. Now they were men
and women of the world, very supercilious men and women; the boys
condescended to Babbitt, they wore evening-clothes, and with hauteur
they accepted cigarettes from silver cases. Babbitt had heard stories
of what the Athletic Club called "goings on" at young parties; of
girls "parking" their corsets in the dressing-room, of "cuddling" and
"petting," and a presumable increase in what was known as Immorality.
To-night he believed the stories. These children seemed bold to him, and
cold. The girls wore misty chiffon, coral velvet, or cloth of gold, and
around their dipping bobbed hair were shining wreaths. He had it, upon
urgent and secret inquiry, that no corsets were known to be parked
upstairs; but certainly these eager bodies were not stiff with steel.
Their stockings were of lustrous silk, their slippers costly and
unnatural, their lips carmined and their eyebrows penciled. They danced
cheek to cheek with the boys, and Babbitt sickened with apprehension and
unconscious envy.

Worst of them all was Eunice Littlefield, and maddest of all the boys
was Ted. Eunice was a flying demon. She slid the length of the room; her
tender shoulders swayed; her feet were deft as a weaver's shuttle; she
laughed, and enticed Babbitt to dance with her.

Then he discovered the annex to the party.

The boys and girls disappeared occasionally, and he remembered rumors
of their drinking together from hip-pocket flasks. He tiptoed round the
house, and in each of the dozen cars waiting in the street he saw the
points of light from cigarettes, from each of them heard high giggles.
He wanted to denounce them but (standing in the snow, peering round
the dark corner) he did not dare. He tried to be tactful. When he had
returned to the front hall he coaxed the boys, "Say, if any of you
fellows are thirsty, there's some dandy ginger ale."

"Oh! Thanks!" they condescended.

He sought his wife, in the pantry, and exploded, "I'd like to go in
there and throw some of those young pups out of the house! They talk
down to me like I was the butler! I'd like to--"

"I know," she sighed; "only everybody says, all the mothers tell me,
unless you stand for them, if you get angry because they go out to their
cars to have a drink