“I do not!  And you—­Always talking about how much you know about motors, and Eunice Littlefield told me you said the battery fed the generator!”

“You—­why, my good woman, you don’t know a generator from a differential.”  Not unreasonably was Ted lofty with her.  He was a natural mechanic, a maker and tinkerer of machines; he lisped in blueprints for the blueprints came.

“That’ll do now!” Babbitt flung in mechanically, as he lighted the gloriously satisfying first cigar of the day and tasted the exhilarating drug of the Advocate-Times headlines.

Ted negotiated:  “Gee, honest, Rone, I don’t want to take the old boat, but I promised couple o’ girls in my class I’d drive ’em down to the rehearsal of the school chorus, and, gee, I don’t want to, but a gentleman’s got to keep his social engagements.”

“Well, upon my word!  You and your social engagements!  In high school!”

“Oh, ain’t we select since we went to that hen college!  Let me tell you there isn’t a private school in the state that’s got as swell a bunch as we got in Gamma Digamma this year.  There’s two fellows that their dads are millionaires.  Say, gee, I ought to have a car of my own, like lots of the fellows.”  Babbitt almost rose.  “A car of your own!  Don’t you want a yacht, and a house and lot?  That pretty nearly takes the cake!  A boy that can’t pass his Latin examinations, like any other boy ought to, and he expects me to give him a motor-car, and I suppose a chauffeur, and an areoplane maybe, as a reward for the hard work he puts in going to the movies with Eunice Littlefield!  Well, when you see me giving you—­”

Somewhat later, after diplomacies, Ted persuaded Verona to admit that she was merely going to the Armory, that evening, to see the dog and cat show.  She was then, Ted planned, to park the car in front of the candy-store across from the Armory and he would pick it up.  There were masterly arrangements regarding leaving the key, and having the gasoline tank filled; and passionately, devotees of the Great God Motor, they hymned the patch on the spare inner-tube, and the lost jack-handle.

Their truce dissolving, Ted observed that her friends were “a scream of a bunch-stuck-up gabby four-flushers.”  His friends, she indicated, were “disgusting imitation sports, and horrid little shrieking ignorant girls.”  Further:  “It’s disgusting of you to smoke cigarettes, and so on and so forth, and those clothes you’ve got on this morning, they’re too utterly ridiculous—­honestly, simply disgusting.”

Ted balanced over to the low beveled mirror in the buffet, regarded his charms, and smirked.  His suit, the latest thing in Old Eli Togs, was skin-tight, with skimpy trousers to the tops of his glaring tan boots, a chorus-man waistline, pattern of an agitated check, and across the back a belt which belted nothing.  His scarf was an enormous black silk wad.  His flaxen hair was ice-smooth, pasted back without parting.  When he went to school he would add a cap with a long vizor like a shovel-blade.  Proudest of all was his waistcoat, saved for, begged for, plotted for; a real Fancy Vest of fawn with polka dots of a decayed red, the points astoundingly long.  On the lower edge of it he wore a high-school button, a class button, and a fraternity pin.