Vecchia’s shop had pale blue woodwork, tracery of plaster roses, attendants in frilled aprons, and glass shelves of “kisses” with all the refinement that inheres in whites of eggs.  Babbitt felt heavy and thick amid this professional daintiness, and as he waited for the ice cream he decided, with hot prickles at the back of his neck, that a girl customer was giggling at him.  He went home in a touchy temper.  The first thing he heard was his wife’s agitated: 

“George!  Did you remember to go to Vecchia’s and get the ice cream?”

“Say!  Look here!  Do I ever forget to do things?”

“Yes!  Often!”

“Well now, it’s darn seldom I do, and it certainly makes me tired, after going into a pink-tea joint like Vecchia’s and having to stand around looking at a lot of half-naked young girls, all rouged up like they were sixty and eating a lot of stuff that simply ruins their stomachs—­”

“Oh, it’s too bad about you!  I’ve noticed how you hate to look at pretty girls!”

With a jar Babbitt realized that his wife was too busy to be impressed by that moral indignation with which males rule the world, and he went humbly up-stairs to dress.  He had an impression of a glorified dining-room, of cut-glass, candles, polished wood, lace, silver, roses.  With the awed swelling of the heart suitable to so grave a business as giving a dinner, he slew the temptation to wear his plaited dress-shirt for a fourth time, took out an entirely fresh one, tightened his black bow, and rubbed his patent-leather pumps with a handkerchief.  He glanced with pleasure at his garnet and silver studs.  He smoothed and patted his ankles, transformed by silk socks from the sturdy shanks of George Babbitt to the elegant limbs of what is called a Clubman.  He stood before the pier-glass, viewing his trim dinner-coat, his beautiful triple-braided trousers; and murmured in lyric beatitude, “By golly, I don’t look so bad.  I certainly don’t look like Catawba.  If the hicks back home could see me in this rig, they’d have a fit!”

He moved majestically down to mix the cocktails.  As he chipped ice, as he squeezed oranges, as he collected vast stores of bottles, glasses, and spoons at the sink in the pantry, he felt as authoritative as the bartender at Healey Hanson’s saloon.  True, Mrs. Babbitt said he was under foot, and Matilda and the maid hired for the evening brushed by him, elbowed him, shrieked “Pleasopn door,” as they tottered through with trays, but in this high moment he ignored them.

Besides the new bottle of gin, his cellar consisted of one half-bottle of Bourbon whisky, a quarter of a bottle of Italian vermouth, and approximately one hundred drops of orange bitters.  He did not possess a cocktail-shaker.  A shaker was proof of dissipation, the symbol of a Drinker, and Babbitt disliked being known as a Drinker even more than he liked a Drink.  He mixed by pouring from an ancient gravy-boat into a handleless pitcher; he poured with a noble dignity, holding his alembics high beneath the powerful Mazda globe, his face hot, his shirt-front a glaring white, the copper sink a scoured red-gold.