She passed from a feeble disgust at their
closer relations into what promised to be ardent affection, but it
drooped into bored routine. Yet she existed only for him and for the
children, and she was as sorry, as worried as himself, when he gave up
the law and trudged on in a rut of listing real estate.

"Poor kid, she hasn't had much better time than I have," Babbitt
reflected, standing in the dark sun-parlor. "But--I wish I could 've had
a whirl at law and politics. Seen what I could do. Well--Maybe I've made
more money as it is."

He returned to the living-room but before he settled down he smoothed
his wife's hair, and she glanced up, happy and somewhat surprised.

CHAPTER VII

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 Eng