allowed to drive with you. Of course I'm not accustomed to associating
with society people like you, so I don't know how to act in such exalted
circles!"

Thus Miss Sonntag talked all the way down to Healey Hanson's. To her
jibes he wanted to reply "Oh, go to the devil!" but he never quite
nerved himself to that reasonable comment. He was resenting the
existence of the whole Bunch. He had heard Tanis speak of "darling
Carrie" and "Min Sonntag--she's so clever--you'll adore her," but
they had never been real to him. He had pictured Tanis as living in a
rose-tinted vacuum, waiting for him, free of all the complications of a
Floral Heights.

When they returned he had to endure the patronage of the young
soda-clerks. They were as damply friendly as Miss Sonntag was dryly
hostile. They called him "Old Georgie" and shouted, "Come on now, sport;
shake a leg" . . . boys in belted coats, pimply boys, as young as Ted
and as flabby as chorus-men, but powerful to dance and to mind the
phonograph and smoke cigarettes and patronize Tanis. He tried to be one
of them; he cried "Good work, Pete!" but his voice creaked.

Tanis apparently enjoyed the companionship of the dancing darlings; she
bridled to their bland flirtation and casually kissed them at the end
of each dance. Babbitt hated her, for the moment. He saw her as
middle-aged. He studied the wrinkles in the softness of her throat, the
slack flesh beneath her chin. The taut muscles of her youth were loose
and drooping. Between dances she sat in the largest chair, waving her
cigarette, summoning her callow admirers to come and talk to her. ("She
thinks she's a blooming queen!" growled Babbitt.) She chanted to Miss
Sonntag, "Isn't my little studio sweet?" ("Studio, rats! It's a plain
old-maid-and-chow-dog flat! Oh, God, I wish I was home! I wonder if I
can't make a getaway now?")

His vision grew blurred, however, as he applied himself to Healey
Hanson's raw but vigorous whisky. He blended with the Bunch. He began
to rejoice that Carrie Nork and Pete, the most nearly intelligent of the
nimble youths, seemed to like him; and it was enormously important to
win over the surly older man, who proved to be a railway clerk named
Fulton Bemis.

The conversation of the Bunch was exclamatory, high-colored, full of
references to people whom Babbitt did not know. Apparently they thought
very comfortably of themselves. They were the Bunch, wise and beautiful
and amusing; they were Bohemia