ns and urbanites, accustomed to all the
luxuries of Zenith: dance-halls, movie-theaters, and roadhouses; and
in a cynical superiority to people who were "slow" or "tightwad" they
cackled:

"Oh, Pete, did I tell you what that dub of a cashier said when I came in
late yesterday? Oh, it was per-fect-ly priceless!"

"Oh, but wasn't T. D. stewed! Say, he was simply ossified! What did
Gladys say to him?"

"Think of the nerve of Bob Bickerstaff trying to get us to come to his
house! Say, the nerve of him! Can you beat it for nerve? Some nerve I
call it!"

"Did you notice how Dotty was dancing? Gee, wasn't she the limit!"

Babbitt was to be heard sonorously agreeing with the once-hated Miss
Minnie Sonntag that persons who let a night go by without dancing to
jazz music were crabs, pikers, and poor fish; and he roared "You bet!"
when Mrs. Carrie Nork gurgled, "Don't you love to sit on the floor? It's
so Bohemian!" He began to think extremely well of the Bunch. When he
mentioned his friends Sir Gerald Doak, Lord Wycombe, William Washington
Eathorne, and Chum Frink, he was proud of their condescending interest.
He got so thoroughly into the jocund spirit that he didn't much mind
seeing Tanis drooping against the shoulder of the youngest and milkiest
of the young men, and he himself desired to hold Carrie Nork's pulpy
hand, and dropped it only because Tanis looked angry.

When he went home, at two, he was fully a member of the Bunch, and
all the week thereafter he was bound by the exceedingly straitened
conventions, the exceedingly wearing demands, of their life of pleasure
and freedom. He had to go to their parties; he was involved in the
agitation when everybody telephoned to everybody else that she hadn't
meant what she'd said when she'd said that, and anyway, why was Pete
going around saying she'd said it?

Never was a Family more insistent on learning one another's movements
than were the Bunch. All of them volubly knew, or indignantly desired
to know, where all the others had been every minute of the week. Babbitt
found himself explaining to Carrie or Fulton Bemis just what he had
been doing that he should not have joined them till ten o'clock, and
apologizing for having gone to dinner with a business acquaintance.

Every member of the Bunch was expected to telephone to every other
member at least once a week. "Why haven't you called me up?" Babbitt
was asked accusingly, not only by Tanis and Carrie but presently by