of the
medicine-cabinet, with a mental note that some day he must remove the
fifty or sixty other blades that were also temporarily, piled up there.
He finished his shaving in a growing testiness increased by his spinning
headache and by the emptiness in his stomach. When he was done, his
round face smooth and streamy and his eyes stinging from soapy water,
he reached for a towel. The family towels were wet, wet and clammy and
vile, all of them wet, he found, as he blindly snatched them--his
own face-towel, his wife's, Verona's, Ted's, Tinka's, and the lone
bath-towel with the huge welt of initial. Then George F. Babbitt did
a dismaying thing. He wiped his face on the guest-towel! It was a
pansy-embroidered trifle which always hung there to indicate that the
Babbitts were in the best Floral Heights society. No one had ever used
it. No guest had ever dared to. Guests secretively took a corner of the
nearest regular towel.

He was raging, "By golly, here they go and use up all the towels, every
doggone one of 'em, and they use 'em and get 'em all wet and sopping,
and never put out a dry one for me--of course, I'm the goat!--and then
I want one and--I'm the only person in the doggone house that's got
the slightest doggone bit of consideration for other people and
thoughtfulness and consider there may be others that may want to use the
doggone bathroom after me and consider--"

He was pitching the chill abominations into the bath-tub, pleased by
the vindictiveness of that desolate flapping sound; and in the midst his
wife serenely trotted in, observed serenely, "Why Georgie dear, what are
you doing? Are you going to wash out the towels? Why, you needn't wash
out the towels. Oh, Georgie, you didn't go and use the guest-towel, did
you?"

It is not recorded that he was able to answer.

For the first time in weeks he was sufficiently roused by his wife to
look at her.

IV

Myra Babbitt--Mrs. George F. Babbitt--was definitely mature. She had
creases from the corners of her mouth to the bottom of her chin, and her
plump neck bagged. But the thing that marked her as having passed the
line was that she no longer had reticences before her husband, and no
longer worried about not having reticences. She was in a petticoat now,
and corsets which bulged, and unaware of being seen in bulgy corsets.
She had become so dully habituated to married life that in her full
matronliness she was as sexless as an anemic nun. She was a goo