He was fretting, “What a family!  I don’t know how we all get to scrapping this way.  Like to go off some place and be able to hear myself think....  Paul ...  Maine ...  Wear old pants, and loaf, and cuss.”  He said cautiously to his wife, “I’ve been in correspondence with a man in New York—­wants me to see him about a real-estate trade—­may not come off till summer.  Hope it doesn’t break just when we and the Rieslings get ready to go to Maine.  Be a shame if we couldn’t make the trip there together.  Well, no use worrying now.”

Verona escaped, immediately after dinner, with no discussion save an automatic “Why don’t you ever stay home?” from Babbitt.

In the living-room, in a corner of the davenport, Ted settled down to his Home Study; plain geometry, Cicero, and the agonizing metaphors of Comus.

“I don’t see why they give us this old-fashioned junk by Milton and Shakespeare and Wordsworth and all these has-beens,” he protested.  “Oh, I guess I could stand it to see a show by Shakespeare, if they had swell scenery and put on a lot of dog, but to sit down in cold blood and read ’em—­These teachers—­how do they get that way?”

Mrs. Babbitt, darning socks, speculated, “Yes, I wonder why.  Of course I don’t want to fly in the face of the professors and everybody, but I do think there’s things in Shakespeare—­not that I read him much, but when I was young the girls used to show me passages that weren’t, really, they weren’t at all nice.”

Babbitt looked up irritably from the comic strips in the Evening Advocate.  They composed his favorite literature and art, these illustrated chronicles in which Mr. Mutt hit Mr. Jeff with a rotten egg, and Mother corrected Father’s vulgarisms by means of a rolling-pin.  With the solemn face of a devotee, breathing heavily through his open mouth, he plodded nightly through every picture, and during the rite he detested interruptions.  Furthermore, he felt that on the subject of Shakespeare he wasn’t really an authority.  Neither the Advocate-Times, the Evening Advocate, nor the Bulletin of the Zenith Chamber of Commerce had ever had an editorial on the matter, and until one of them had spoken he found it hard to form an original opinion.  But even at risk of floundering in strange bogs, he could not keep out of an open controversy.

“I’ll tell you why you have to study Shakespeare and those.  It’s because they’re required for college entrance, and that’s all there is to it!  Personally, I don’t see myself why they stuck ’em into an up-to-date high-school system like we have in this state.  Be a good deal better if you took Business English, and learned how to write an ad, or letters that would pull.  But there it is, and there’s no tall, argument, or discussion about it!  Trouble with you, Ted, is you always want to do something different!  If you’re going to law-school—­and you are!—­I never had a chance to, but I’ll see that you do—­why, you’ll want to lay in all the English and Latin you can get.”