Every second house in Floral Heights had a bedroom precisely like this.

The Babbitts’ house was five years old.  It was all as competent and glossy as this bedroom.  It had the best of taste, the best of inexpensive rugs, a simple and laudable architecture, and the latest conveniences.  Throughout, electricity took the place of candles and slatternly hearth-fires.  Along the bedroom baseboard were three plugs for electric lamps, concealed by little brass doors.  In the halls were plugs for the vacuum cleaner, and in the living-room plugs for the piano lamp, for the electric fan.  The trim dining-room (with its admirable oak buffet, its leaded-glass cupboard, its creamy plaster walls, its modest scene of a salmon expiring upon a pile of oysters) had plugs which supplied the electric percolator and the electric toaster.

In fact there was but one thing wrong with the Babbitt house:  It was not a home.

II

Often of a morning Babbitt came bouncing and jesting in to breakfast.  But things were mysteriously awry to-day.  As he pontifically tread the upper hall he looked into Verona’s bedroom and protested, “What’s the use of giving the family a high-class house when they don’t appreciate it and tend to business and get down to brass tacks?”

He marched upon them:  Verona, a dumpy brown-haired girl of twenty-two, just out of Bryn Mawr, given to solicitudes about duty and sex and God and the unconquerable bagginess of the gray sports-suit she was now wearing.  Ted—­Theodore Roosevelt Babbitt—­a decorative boy of seventeen.  Tinka—­Katherine—­still a baby at ten, with radiant red hair and a thin skin which hinted of too much candy and too many ice cream sodas.  Babbitt did not show his vague irritation as he tramped in.  He really disliked being a family tyrant, and his nagging was as meaningless as it was frequent.  He shouted at Tinka, “Well, kittiedoolie!” It was the only pet name in his vocabulary, except the “dear” and “hon.” with which he recognized his wife, and he flung it at Tinka every morning.

He gulped a cup of coffee in the hope of pacifying his stomach and his soul.  His stomach ceased 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.”