They had but two, one, or no children; and despite the myth that the Great War had made work respectable, their husbands objected to their “wasting time and getting a lot of crank ideas” in unpaid social work, and still more to their causing a rumor, by earning money, that they were not adequately supported.
They worked perhaps two hours a day, and the rest of the time they ate chocolates, went to the motion-pictures, went window-shopping, went in gossiping twos and threes to card-parties, read magazines, thought timorously of the lovers who never appeared, and accumulated a splendid restlessness which they got rid of by nagging their husbands. The husbands nagged back.
Of these naggers the Swansons were perfect specimens.
Throughout the dinner Eddie Swanson had been complaining, publicly, about his wife’s new frock.
It was, he submitted, too short, too low, too immodestly thin, and much too expensive.
He appealed to Babbitt:
“Honest, George, what do you think of that rag Louetta went and bought?
Don’t you think it’s the limit?”
“What’s eating you, Eddie?
I call it a swell little dress.”
“Oh, it is, Mr. Swanson. It’s a sweet frock,” Mrs. Babbitt protested.
“There now, do you see, smarty!
You’re such an authority on clothes!” Louetta raged, while the guests ruminated and peeped at her shoulders.
“That’s all right now,” said Swanson.
“I’m authority enough so I know it was a waste of money, and it makes me tired to see you not wearing out a whole closetful of clothes you got already.
I’ve expressed my idea about this before, and you know good and well you didn’t pay the least bit of attention.
I have to camp on your trail to get you to do anything—”
There was much more of it, and they all assisted, all but Babbitt.
Everything about him was dim except his stomach, and that was a bright scarlet disturbance.
“Had too much grub; oughtn’t to eat this stuff,” he groaned—while he went on eating, while he gulped down a chill and glutinous slice of the ice-cream brick, and cocoanut cake as oozy as shaving-cream.
He felt as though he had been stuffed with clay; his body was bursting, his throat was bursting, his brain was hot mud; and only with agony did he continue to smile and shout as became a host on Floral Heights.
He would, except for his guests, have fled outdoors and walked off the intoxication of food, but in the haze which filled the room they sat forever, talking, talking, while he agonized,
“Darn fool to be eating all this—not ‘nother mouthful,” and discovered that he was again tasting the sickly welter of melted ice cream on his plate.
There was no magic in his friends; he was not uplifted when Howard Littlefield produced from his treasure-house of scholarship the information that the chemical symbol for raw rubber is C10H16, which turns into isoprene, or 2C5H8. Suddenly, without precedent, Babbitt was not merely bored but admitting that he was bored.
It was ecstasy to escape from the table, from the torture of a straight chair, and loll on the davenport in the living-room.
The others, from their fitful unconvincing talk, their expressions of being slowly and painfully smothered, seemed to be suffering from the toil of social life and the horror of good food as much as himself.
All of them accepted with relief the suggestion of bridge.
Babbitt recovered from the feeling of being boiled.
He won at bridge.
He was again able to endure Vergil Gunch’s inexorable heartiness.
But he pictured loafing with Paul Riesling beside a lake in Maine.
It was as overpowering and imaginative as homesickness.
He had never seen Maine, yet he beheld the shrouded mountains, the tranquil lake of evening.
“That boy Paul’s worth all these ballyhooing highbrows put together,” he muttered; and,
“I’d like to get away from—everything.”
Even Louetta Swanson did not rouse him.
Mrs. Swanson was pretty and pliant.
Babbitt was not an analyst of women, except as to their tastes in Furnished Houses to Rent.
He divided them into Real Ladies, Working Women, Old Cranks, and Fly Chickens.
He mooned over their charms but he was of opinion that all of them (save the women of his own family) were “different” and “mysterious.”
Yet he had known by instinct that Louetta Swanson could be approached.
Her eyes and lips were moist.
Her face tapered from a broad forehead to a pointed chin, her mouth was thin but strong and avid, and between her brows were two outcurving and passionate wrinkles.
She was thirty, perhaps, or younger.
Gossip had never touched her, but every man naturally and instantly rose to flirtatiousness when he spoke to her, and every woman watched her with stilled blankness.
Between games, sitting on the davenport, Babbitt spoke to her with the requisite gallantry, that sonorous Floral Heights gallantry which is not flirtation but a terrified flight from it:
“You’re looking like a new soda-fountain to night, Louetta.”
“Am I?”
“Ole Eddie kind of on the rampage.”
“Yes.