He tasted the sacred essence.  “Now, by golly, if that isn’t pretty near one fine old cocktail!  Kind of a Bronx, and yet like a Manhattan.  Ummmmmm!  Hey, Myra, want a little nip before the folks come?”

Bustling into the dining-room, moving each glass a quarter of an inch, rushing back with resolution implacable on her face her gray and silver-lace party frock protected by a denim towel, Mrs. Babbitt glared at him, and rebuked him, “Certainly not!”

“Well,” in a loose, jocose manner, “I think the old man will!”

The cocktail filled him with a whirling exhilaration behind which he was aware of devastating desires—­to rush places in fast motors, to kiss girls, to sing, to be witty.  He sought to regain his lost dignity by announcing to Matilda: 

“I’m going to stick this pitcher of cocktails in the refrigerator.  Be sure you don’t upset any of ’em.”

“Yeh.”

“Well, be sure now.  Don’t go putting anything on this top shelf.”

“Yeh.”

“Well, be—­” He was dizzy.  His voice was thin and distant.  “Whee!” With enormous impressiveness he commanded, “Well, be sure now,” and minced into the safety of the living-room.  He wondered whether he could persuade “as slow a bunch as Myra and the Littlefields to go some place aft’ dinner and raise Cain and maybe dig up smore booze.”  He perceived that he had gifts of profligacy which had been neglected.

By the time the guests had come, including the inevitable late couple for whom the others waited with painful amiability, a great gray emptiness had replaced the purple swirling in Babbitt’s head, and he had to force the tumultuous greetings suitable to a host on Floral Heights.

The guests were Howard Littlefield, the doctor of philosophy who furnished publicity and comforting economics to the Street Traction Company; Vergil Gunch, the coal-dealer, equally powerful in the Elks and in the Boosters’ Club; Eddie Swanson the agent for the Javelin Motor Car, who lived across the street; and Orville Jones, owner of the Lily White Laundry, which justly announced itself “the biggest, busiest, bulliest cleanerie shoppe in Zenith.”  But, naturally, the most distinguished of all was T. Cholmondeley Frink, who was not only the author of “Poemulations,” which, syndicated daily in sixty-seven leading newspapers, gave him one of the largest audiences of any poet in the world, but also an optimistic lecturer and the creator of “Ads that Add.”  Despite the searching philosophy and high morality of his verses, they were humorous and easily understood by any child of twelve; and it added a neat air of pleasantry to them that they were set not as verse but as prose.  Mr. Frink was known from Coast to Coast as “Chum.”