Babbitt | Page 9

to feel as though it did not belong to him, but
Verona began to be conscientious and annoying, and abruptly there
returned to Babbitt the doubts regarding life and families and business
which had clawed at him when his dream-life and the slim fairy girl
had fled.
Verona had for six months been filing-clerk at the Gruensberg Leather
Company offices, with a prospect of becoming secretary to Mr.
Gruensberg and thus, as Babbitt defined it, "getting some good out of
your expensive college education till you're ready to marry and settle
down."
But now said Verona: "Father! I was talking to a classmate of mine

that's working for the Associated Charities--oh, Dad, there's the
sweetest little babies that come to the milk-station there!--and I feel as
though I ought to be doing something worth while like that."
"What do you mean 'worth while'? If you get to be Gruensberg's
secretary--and maybe you would, if you kept up your shorthand and
didn't go sneaking off to concerts and talkfests every evening--I guess
you'll find thirty-five or forty bones a week worth while!"
"I know, but--oh, I want to--contribute--I wish I were working in a
settlement-house. I wonder if I could get one of the department-stores
to let me put in a welfare-department with a nice rest-room and
chintzes and wicker chairs and so on and so forth. Or I could--"
"Now you look here! The first thing you got to understand is that all
this uplift and flipflop and settlement-work and recreation is nothing in
God's world but the entering wedge for socialism. The sooner a man
learns he isn't going to be coddled, and he needn't expect a lot of free
grub and, uh, all these free classes and flipflop and doodads for his kids
unless he earns 'em, why, the sooner he'll get on the job and
produce--produce--produce! That's what the country needs, and not all
this fancy stuff that just enfeebles the will-power of the working man
and gives his kids a lot of notions above their class. And you--if you'd
tend to business instead of fooling and fussing--All the time! When I
was a young man I made up my mind what I wanted to do, and stuck to
it through thick and thin, and that's why I'm where I am to-day,
and--Myra! What do you let the girl chop the toast up into these dinky
little chunks for? Can't get your fist onto 'em. Half cold, anyway!"
Ted Babbitt, junior in the great East Side High School, had been
making hiccup-like sounds of interruption. He blurted now, "Say, Rone,
you going to--"
Verona whirled. "Ted! Will you kindly not interrupt us when we're
talking about serious matters!"
"Aw punk," said Ted judicially. "Ever since somebody slipped up and
let you out of college, Ammonia, you been pulling these nut

conversations about what-nots and so-on-and-so-forths. Are you going
to--I want to use the car tonight."
Babbitt snorted, "Oh, you do! May want it myself!" Verona protested,
"Oh, you do, Mr. Smarty! I'm going to take it myself!" Tinka wailed,
"Oh, papa, you said maybe you'd drive us down to Rosedale!" and Mrs.
Babbitt, "Careful, Tinka, your sleeve is in the butter." They glared, and
Verona hurled, "Ted, you're a perfect pig about the car!"
"Course you're not! Not a-tall!" Ted could be maddeningly bland. "You
just want to grab it off, right after dinner, and leave it in front of some
skirt's house all evening while you sit and gas about lite'ature and the
highbrows you're going to marry--if they only propose!"
"Well, Dad oughtn't to EVER let you have it! You and those beastly
Jones boys drive like maniacs. The idea of your taking the turn on
Chautauqua Place at forty miles an hour!"
"Aw, where do you get that stuff! You're so darn scared of the car that
you drive up-hill with the emergency brake on!"
"I do not! And you--Always talking about how much you know about
motors, and Eunice Littlefield told me you said the battery fed the
generator!"
"You--why, my good woman, you don't know a generator from a
differential." Not unreasonably was Ted lofty with her. He was a
natural mechanic, a maker and tinkerer of machines; he lisped in
blueprints for the blueprints came.
"That'll do now!" Babbitt flung in mechanically, as he lighted the
gloriously satisfying first cigar of the day and tasted the exhilarating
drug of the Advocate-Times headlines.
Ted negotiated: "Gee, honest, Rone, I don't want to take the old boat,
but I promised couple o' girls in my class I'd drive 'em down to the
rehearsal of the school chorus, and, gee, I don't want to, but a
gentleman's got to keep his social engagements."

"Well, upon my word! You and your social engagements! In high
school!"
"Oh, ain't