Thus Miss Sonntag talked all the way down to Healey Hanson’s.  To her jibes he wanted to reply “Oh, go to the devil!” but he never quite nerved himself to that reasonable comment.  He was resenting the existence of the whole Bunch.  He had heard Tanis speak of “darling Carrie” and “Min Sonntag—­she’s so clever—­you’ll adore her,” but they had never been real to him.  He had pictured Tanis as living in a rose-tinted vacuum, waiting for him, free of all the complications of a Floral Heights.

When they returned he had to endure the patronage of the young soda-clerks.  They were as damply friendly as Miss Sonntag was dryly hostile.  They called him “Old Georgie” and shouted, “Come on now, sport; shake a leg” . . . boys in belted coats, pimply boys, as young as Ted and as flabby as chorus-men, but powerful to dance and to mind the phonograph and smoke cigarettes and patronize Tanis.  He tried to be one of them; he cried “Good work, Pete!” but his voice creaked.

Tanis apparently enjoyed the companionship of the dancing darlings; she bridled to their bland flirtation and casually kissed them at the end of each dance.  Babbitt hated her, for the moment.  He saw her as middle-aged.  He studied the wrinkles in the softness of her throat, the slack flesh beneath her chin.  The taut muscles of her youth were loose and drooping.  Between dances she sat in the largest chair, waving her cigarette, summoning her callow admirers to come and talk to her. ("She thinks she’s a blooming queen!” growled Babbitt.) She chanted to Miss Sonntag, “Isn’t my little studio sweet?” ("Studio, rats!  It’s a plain old-maid-and-chow-dog flat!  Oh, God, I wish I was home!  I wonder if I can’t make a getaway now?”)

His vision grew blurred, however, as he applied himself to Healey Hanson’s raw but vigorous whisky.  He blended with the Bunch.  He began to rejoice that Carrie Nork and Pete, the most nearly intelligent of the nimble youths, seemed to like him; and it was enormously important to win over the surly older man, who proved to be a railway clerk named Fulton Bemis.

The conversation of the Bunch was exclamatory, high-colored, full of references to people whom Babbitt did not know.  Apparently they thought very comfortably of themselves.  They were the Bunch, wise and beautiful and amusing; they were Bohemians and urbanites, accustomed to all the luxuries of Zenith:  dance-halls, movie-theaters, and roadhouses; and in a cynical superiority to people who were “slow” or “tightwad” they cackled: 

“Oh, Pete, did I tell you what that dub of a cashier said when I came in late yesterday?  Oh, it was per-fect-ly priceless!”

“Oh, but wasn’t T. D. stewed!  Say, he was simply ossified!  What did Gladys say to him?”

“Think of the nerve of Bob Bickerstaff trying to get us to come to his house!  Say, the nerve of him!  Can you beat it for nerve?  Some nerve I call it!”

“Did you notice how Dotty was dancing?  Gee, wasn’t she the limit!”