Boys wheeled about miraculous electrical massage-machines.
The barbers snatched steaming towels from a machine like a howitzer of polished nickel and disdainfully flung them away after a second’s use.
On the vast marble shelf facing the chairs were hundreds of tonics, amber and ruby and emerald.
It was flattering to Babbitt to have two personal slaves at once—the barber and the bootblack.
He would have been completely happy if he could also have had the manicure girl.
The barber snipped at his hair and asked his opinion of the Havre de Grace races, the baseball season, and Mayor Prout.
The young negro bootblack hummed
“The Camp Meeting Blues” and polished in rhythm to his tune, drawing the shiny shoe-rag so taut at each stroke that it snapped like a banjo string.
The barber was an excellent salesman. He made Babbitt feel rich and important by his manner of inquiring,
“What is your favorite tonic, sir?
Have you time to-day, sir, for a facial massage?
Your scalp is a little tight; shall I give you a scalp massage?”
Babbitt’s best thrill was in the shampoo.
The barber made his hair creamy with thick soap, then (as Babbitt bent over the bowl, muffled in towels) drenched it with hot water which prickled along his scalp, and at last ran the water ice-cold.
At the shock, the sudden burning cold on his skull, Babbitt’s heart thumped, his chest heaved, and his spine was an electric wire.
It was a sensation which broke the monotony of life.
He looked grandly about the shop as he sat up.
The barber obsequiously rubbed his wet hair and bound it in a towel as in a turban, so that Babbitt resembled a plump pink calif on an ingenious and adjustable throne.
The barber begged (in the manner of one who was a good fellow yet was overwhelmed by the splendors of the calif),
“How about a little Eldorado Oil Rub, sir?
Very beneficial to the scalp, sir.
Didn’t I give you one the last time?”
He hadn’t, but Babbitt agreed,
“Well, all right.”
With quaking eagerness he saw that his manicure girl was free.
“I don’t know, I guess I’ll have a manicure after all,” he droned, and excitedly watched her coming, dark-haired, smiling, tender, little.
The manicuring would have to be finished at her table, and he would be able to talk to her without the barber listening.
He waited contentedly, not trying to peep at her, while she filed his nails and the barber shaved him and smeared on his burning cheeks all the interesting mixtures which the pleasant minds of barbers have devised through the revolving ages.
When the barber was done and he sat opposite the girl at her table, he admired the marble slab of it, admired the sunken set bowl with its tiny silver taps, and admired himself for being able to frequent so costly a place.
When she withdrew his wet hand from the bowl, it was so sensitive from the warm soapy water that he was abnormally aware of the clasp of her firm little paw.
He delighted in the pinkness and glossiness of her nails.
Her hands seemed to him more adorable than Mrs. Judique’s thin fingers, and more elegant.
He had a certain ecstasy in the pain when she gnawed at the cuticle of his nails with a sharp knife.
He struggled not to look at the outline of her young bosom and her shoulders, the more apparent under a film of pink chiffon.
He was conscious of her as an exquisite thing, and when he tried to impress his personality on her he spoke as awkwardly as a country boy at his first party:
“Well, kinda hot to be working to-day.”
“Oh, yes, it is hot.
You cut your own nails, last time, didn’t you!”
“Ye-es, guess I must ‘ve.”
“You always ought to go to a manicure.”
“Yes, maybe that’s so. I—”
“There’s nothing looks so nice as nails that are looked after good.
I always think that’s the best way to spot a real gent.
There was an auto salesman in here yesterday that claimed you could always tell a fellow’s class by the car he drove, but I says to him,
‘Don’t be silly,’ I says; ‘the wisenheimers grab a look at a fellow’s nails when they want to tell if he’s a tin-horn or a real gent!”’
“Yes, maybe there’s something to that.
Course, that is—with a pretty kiddy like you, a man can’t help coming to get his mitts done.”
“Yeh, I may be a kid, but I’m a wise bird, and I know nice folks when I see um—I can read character at a glance—and I’d never talk so frank with a fellow if I couldn’t see he was a nice fellow.”
She smiled.
Her eyes seemed to him as gentle as April pools.