Babbitt | Page 5

packet of new
razor-blades (reflecting, as invariably, "Be cheaper to buy one of these
dinguses and strop your own blades,") and when he discovered the
packet, behind the round box of bicarbonate of soda, he thought ill of
his wife for putting it there and very well of himself for not saying
"Damn." But he did say it, immediately afterward, when with wet and
soap-slippery fingers he tried to remove the horrible little envelope and
crisp clinging oiled paper from the new blade. Then there was the
problem, oft-pondered, never solved, of what to do with the old blade,
which might imperil the fingers of his young. As usual, he tossed it on
top of the medicine-cabinet, with a mental note that some day he must
remove the fifty or sixty other blades that were also temporarily, piled
up there. He finished his shaving in a growing testiness increased by
his spinning headache and by the emptiness in his stomach. When he
was done, his round face smooth and streamy and his eyes stinging
from soapy water, he reached for a towel. The family towels were wet,
wet and clammy and vile, all of them wet, he found, as he blindly
snatched them--his own face-towel, his wife's, Verona's, Ted's, Tinka's,
and the lone bath-towel with the huge welt of initial. Then George F.
Babbitt did a dismaying thing. He wiped his face on the guest-towel! It
was a pansy-embroidered trifle which always hung there to indicate
that the Babbitts were in the best Floral Heights society. No one had
ever used it. No guest had ever dared to. Guests secretively took a
corner of the nearest regular towel.
He was raging, "By golly, here they go and use up all the towels, every
doggone one of 'em, and they use 'em and get 'em all wet and sopping,
and never put out a dry one for me--of course, I'm the goat!--and then I
want one and--I'm the only person in the doggone house that's got the
slightest doggone bit of consideration for other people and
thoughtfulness and consider there may be others that may want to use

the doggone bathroom after me and consider--"
He was pitching the chill abominations into the bath-tub, pleased by the
vindictiveness of that desolate flapping sound; and in the midst his wife
serenely trotted in, observed serenely, "Why Georgie dear, what are
you doing? Are you going to wash out the towels? Why, you needn't
wash out the towels. Oh, Georgie, you didn't go and use the guest-towel,
did you?"
It is not recorded that he was able to answer.
For the first time in weeks he was sufficiently roused by his wife to
look at her.
IV
Myra Babbitt--Mrs. George F. Babbitt--was definitely mature. She had
creases from the corners of her mouth to the bottom of her chin, and her
plump neck bagged. But the thing that marked her as having passed the
line was that she no longer had reticences before her husband, and no
longer worried about not having reticences. She was in a petticoat now,
and corsets which bulged, and unaware of being seen in bulgy corsets.
She had become so dully habituated to married life that in her full
matronliness she was as sexless as an anemic nun. She was a good
woman, a kind woman, a diligent woman, but no one, save perhaps
Tinka her ten-year-old, was at all interested in her or entirely aware that
she was alive.
After a rather thorough discussion of all the domestic and social aspects
of towels she apologized to Babbitt for his having an alcoholic
headache; and he recovered enough to endure the search for a B.V.D.
undershirt which had, he pointed out, malevolently been concealed
among his clean pajamas.
He was fairly amiable in the conference on the brown suit.
"What do you think, Myra?" He pawed at the clothes hunched on a
chair in their bedroom, while she moved about mysteriously adjusting

and patting her petticoat and, to his jaundiced eye, never seeming to get
on with her dressing. "How about it? Shall I wear the brown suit
another day?"
"Well, it looks awfully nice on you."
"I know, but gosh, it needs pressing."
"That's so. Perhaps it does."
"It certainly could stand being pressed, all right."
"Yes, perhaps it wouldn't hurt it to be pressed."
"But gee, the coat doesn't need pressing. No sense in having the whole
darn suit pressed, when the coat doesn't need it."
"That's so."
"But the pants certainly need it, all right. Look at them--look at those
wrinkles--the pants certainly do need pressing."
"That's so. Oh, Georgie, why couldn't you wear the brown coat with the
blue trousers we were wondering what we'd do with them?"
"Good Lord! Did you ever in all my