thing her, "Still pretty bad, honey?"

"Yes, it just gripes me, and I can't get to sleep."

Her voice was faint. He knew her dread of doctors' verdicts and he
did not inform her, but he creaked down-stairs, telephoned to Dr.
Earl Patten, and waited, shivering, trying with fuzzy eyes to read a
magazine, till he heard the doctor's car.

The doctor was youngish and professionally breezy. He came in as though
it were sunny noontime. "Well, George, little trouble, eh? How is
she now?" he said busily as, with tremendous and rather irritating
cheerfulness, he tossed his coat on a chair and warmed his hands at
a radiator. He took charge of the house. Babbitt felt ousted and
unimportant as he followed the doctor up to the bedroom, and it was the
doctor who chuckled, "Oh, just little stomach-ache" when Verona peeped
through her door, begging, "What is it, Dad, what is it?"

To Mrs. Babbitt the doctor said with amiable belligerence, after his
examination, "Kind of a bad old pain, eh? I'll give you something to
make you sleep, and I think you'll feel better in the morning. I'll come
in right after breakfast." But to Babbitt, lying in wait in the lower
hall, the doctor sighed, "I don't like the feeling there in her belly.
There's some rigidity and some inflammation. She's never had her
appendix out has she? Um. Well, no use worrying. I'll be here first
thing in the morning, and meantime she'll get some rest. I've given her
a hypo. Good night."

Then was Babbitt caught up in the black tempest.

Instantly all the indignations which had been dominating him and the
spiritual dramas through which he had struggled became pallid and
absurd before the ancient and overwhelming realities, the standard and
traditional realities, of sickness and menacing death, the long night,
and the thousand steadfast implications of married life. He crept back
to her. As she drowsed away in the tropic languor of morphia, he sat on
the edge of her bed, holding her hand, and for the first time in many
weeks her hand abode trustfully in his.

He draped himself grotesquely in his toweling bathrobe and a pink and
white couch-cover, and sat lumpishly in a wing-chair. The bedroom was
uncanny in its half-light, which turned the curtains to lurking robbers,
the dressing-table to a turreted castle. It smelled of cosmetics, of
linen, of sleep. He napped and woke, napped and woke, a hundred times.
He heard her move and sigh in slumber; he wondered if there wasn't