At eleven they all drove out to the Old Farm Inn.  Babbitt sat in the back of Doppelbrau’s car with Louetta Swanson.  Once he had timorously tried to make love to her.  Now he did not try; he merely made love; and Louetta dropped her head on his shoulder, told him what a nagger Eddie was, and accepted Babbitt as a decent and well-trained libertine.

With the assistance of Tanis’s Bunch, the Doppelbraus, and other companions in forgetfulness, there was not an evening for two weeks when he did not return home late and shaky.  With his other faculties blurred he yet had the motorist’s gift of being able to drive when he could scarce walk; of slowing down at corners and allowing for approaching cars.  He came wambling into the house.  If Verona and Kenneth Escott were about, he got past them with a hasty greeting, horribly aware of their level young glances, and hid himself up-stairs.  He found when he came into the warm house that he was hazier than he had believed.  His head whirled.  He dared not lie down.  He tried to soak out the alcohol in a hot bath.  For the moment his head was clearer but when he moved about the bathroom his calculations of distance were wrong, so that he dragged down the towels, and knocked over the soap-dish with a clatter which, he feared, would betray him to the children.  Chilly in his dressing-gown he tried to read the evening paper.  He could follow every word; he seemed to take in the sense of things; but a minute afterward he could not have told what he had been reading.  When he went to bed his brain flew in circles, and he hastily sat up, struggling for self-control.  At last he was able to lie still, feeling only a little sick and dizzy—­and enormously ashamed.  To hide his “condition” from his own children!  To have danced and shouted with people whom he despised!  To have said foolish things, sung idiotic songs, tried to kiss silly girls!  Incredulously he remembered that he had by his roaring familiarity with them laid himself open to the patronizing of youths whom he would have kicked out of his office; that by dancing too ardently he had exposed himself to rebukes from the rattiest of withering women.  As it came relentlessly back to him he snarled, “I hate myself!  God how I hate myself!” But, he raged, “I’m through!  No more!  Had enough, plenty!”

He was even surer about it the morning after, when he was trying to be grave and paternal with his daughters at breakfast.  At noontime he was less sure.  He did not deny that he had been a fool; he saw it almost as clearly as at midnight; but anything, he struggled, was better than going back to a life of barren heartiness.  At four he wanted a drink.  He kept a whisky flask in his desk now, and after two minutes of battle he had his drink.  Three drinks later he began to see the Bunch as tender and amusing friends, and by six he was with them . . . and the tale was to be told all over.