I
HE solemnly finished the last copy of the American Magazine,
while his wife sighed, laid away her darning, and looked
enviously at the lingerie designs in a women's magazine. The
room was very still.
It was a room which observed the best Floral Heights
standards. The gray walls were divided into artificial paneling
by strips of white-enameled pine. From the Babbitts'
former house had come two much-carved rocking-chairs, but
the other chairs were new, very deep and restful, upholstered
in blue and gold-striped velvet. A blue velvet davenport faced
the fireplace, and behind it was a cherrywood table and a tall
piano-lamp with a shade of golden silk. (Two out of every
three houses in Floral Heights had before the fireplace a davenport,
a mahogany table real or imitation, and a piano-lamp
or a reading-lamp with a shade of yellow or rose silk.)
On the table was a runner of gold-threaded Chinese fabric,
four magazines, a silver box containing cigarette-crumbs, and
three "gift-books''—large, expensive editions of fairy-tales
illustrated by English artists and as yet unread by any Babbitt
save Tinka.
In a corner by the front windows was a large cabinet Victrola.
(Eight out of every nine Floral Heights houses had
a cabinet phonograph.)
Among the pictures, hung in the exact center of each gray
panel, were a red and black imitation English hunting-print,
an anemic imitation boudoir-print with a French caption of
whose morality Babbitt had always been rather suspicious,
and a "hand-colored'' photograph of a Colonial room—rag rug,
maiden spinning, cat demure before a white fireplace. (Nineteen
out of every twenty houses in Floral Heights had either
a hunting-print, a
Madame Feit la Toilette print, a colored
photograph of a New England house, a photograph of a Rocky
Mountain, or all four.)
It was a room as superior in comfort to the "parlor'' of
Babbitt's boyhood as his motor was superior to his father's
buggy. Though there was nothing in the room that was interesting,
there was nothing that was offensive. It was as
neat, and as negative, as a block of artificial ice. The fireplace
was unsoftened by downy ashes or by sooty brick; the
brass fire-irons were of immaculate polish; and the grenadier
andirons were like samples in a shop, desolate, unwanted, lifeless
things of commerce.
Against the wall was a piano, with another piano-lamp, but
no one used it save Tinka. The hard briskness of the phonograph
contented them; their store of jazz records made them
feel wealthy and cultured; and all they knew of creating music
was the nice adjustment of a bamboo needle. The books on
the table were unspotted and laid in rigid parallels; not one
corner of the carpet-rug was curled; and nowhere was there
a hockey-stick, a torn picture-book, an old cap, or a gregarious
and disorganizing dog.