I
RELIEVED of Babbitt's bumbling and the soft grunts with
which his wife expressed the sympathy she was too experienced
to feel and much too experienced not to show, their bedroom
settled instantly into impersonality.
It gave on the sleeping-porch. It served both of them as
dressing-room, and on the coldest nights Babbitt luxuriously
gave up the duty of being manly and retreated to the bed
inside, to curl his toes in the warmth and laugh at the January
gale.
The room displayed a modest and pleasant color-scheme,
after one of the best standard designs of the decorator who
"did the interiors'' for most of the speculative-builders' houses
in Zenith. The walls were gray, the woodwork white, the
rug a serene blue; and very much like mahogany was the furniture—
the bureau with its great clear mirror, Mrs. Babbitt's
dressing-table with toilet-articles of almost solid silver, the
plain twin beds, between them a small table holding a standard
electric bedside lamp, a glass for water, and a standard bedside
book with colored illustrations—what particular book it
was cannot be ascertained, since no one had ever opened it.
The mattresses were firm but not hard, triumphant modern
mattresses which had cost a great deal of money; the hot-water
radiator was of exactly the proper scientific surface
for the cubic contents of the room. The windows were large
and easily opened, with the best catches and cords, and Holland
roller-shades guaranteed not to crack. It was a masterpiece
among bedrooms, right out of Cheerful Modern Houses
for Medium Incomes. Only it had nothing to do with the
Babbitts, nor with any one else. If people had ever lived
and loved here, read thrillers at midnight and lain in beautiful
indolence on a Sunday morning, there were no signs of
it. It had the air of being a very good room in a very good
hotel. One expected the chambermaid to come in and make
it ready for people who would stay but one night, go without
looking back, and never think of it again.
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.