ut gosh, there's no way of telling it. I don't believe that outside of
the office and playing a little bum golf on Saturday he knows there's
anything in the world to do except just keep sitting there-sitting
there every night--not wanting to go anywhere--not wanting to do
anything--thinking us kids are crazy--sitting there--Lord!"

IV

If he was frightened by Ted's slackness, Babbitt was not sufficiently
frightened by Verona. She was too safe. She lived too much in the neat
little airless room of her mind. Kenneth Escott and she were always
under foot. When they were not at home, conducting their cautiously
radical courtship over sheets of statistics, they were trudging off to
lectures by authors and Hindu philosophers and Swedish lieutenants.

"Gosh," Babbitt wailed to his wife, as they walked home from the
Fogartys' bridge-party, "it gets me how Rone and that fellow can be so
poky. They sit there night after night, whenever he isn't working,
and they don't know there's any fun in the world. All talk and
discussion--Lord! Sitting there--sitting there--night after night--not
wanting to do anything--thinking I'm crazy because I like to go out and
play a fist of cards--sitting there--gosh!"

Then round the swimmer, bored by struggling through the perpetual surf
of family life, new combers swelled.

V

Babbitt's father- and mother-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Henry T. Thompson,
rented their old house in the Bellevue district and moved to the Hotel
Hatton, that glorified boarding-house filled with widows, red-plush
furniture, and the sound of ice-water pitchers. They were lonely there,
and every other Sunday evening the Babbitts had to dine with them, on
fricasseed chicken, discouraged celery, and cornstarch ice cream, and
afterward sit, polite and restrained, in the hotel lounge, while a young
woman violinist played songs from the German via Broadway.

Then Babbitt's own mother came down from Catawba to spend three weeks.

She was a kind woman and magnificently uncomprehending. She
congratulated the convention-defying Verona on being a "nice, loyal
home-body without all these Ideas that so many girls seem to have
nowadays;" and when Ted filled the differential with grease, out of pure
love of mechanics and filthiness, she rejoiced that he was "so handy
around the house--and helping his father and all, and not going out with
the girls all the time and trying to pretend he was a society fellow."

Babbitt loved his moth