ice cream."

"All riiiiiight! Gosh, I'm going to get it!"

"All you have to do is to go in and say you want the ice cream that Mrs.
Babbitt ordered yesterday by 'phone, and it will be all ready for you."

At ten-thirty she telephoned to him not to forget the ice cream from
Vecchia's.

He was surprised and blasted then by a thought. He wondered whether
Floral Heights dinners were worth the hideous toil involved. But he
repented the sacrilege in the excitement of buying the materials for
cocktails.

Now this was the manner of obtaining alcohol under the reign of
righteousness and prohibition:

He drove from the severe rectangular streets of the modern business
center into the tangled byways of Old Town--jagged blocks filled with
sooty warehouses and lofts; on into The Arbor, once a pleasant orchard
but now a morass of lodging-houses, tenements, and brothels. Exquisite
shivers chilled his spine and stomach, and he looked at every policeman
with intense innocence, as one who loved the law, and admired the Force,
and longed to stop and play with them. He parked his car a block from
Healey Hanson's saloon, worrying, "Well, rats, if anybody did see me,
they'd think I was here on business."

He entered a place curiously like the saloons of ante-prohibition days,
with a long greasy bar with sawdust in front and streaky mirror behind,
a pine table at which a dirty old man dreamed over a glass of something
which resembled whisky, and with two men at the bar, drinking something
which resembled beer, and giving that impression of forming a large
crowd which two men always give in a saloon. The bartender, a tall pale
Swede with a diamond in his lilac scarf, stared at Babbitt as he stalked
plumply up to the bar and whispered, "I'd, uh--Friend of Hanson's sent
me here. Like to get some gin."

The bartender gazed down on him in the manner of an outraged bishop.
"I guess you got the wrong place, my friend. We sell nothing but soft
drinks here." He cleaned the bar with a rag which would itself have done
with a little cleaning, and glared across his mechanically moving elbow.

The old dreamer at the table petitioned the bartender, "Say, Oscar,
listen."

Oscar did not listen.

"Aw, say, Oscar, listen, will yuh? Say, lis-sen!"

The decayed and drowsy voice of the loafer, the agreeable stink of
beer-dregs, threw a spell of inanition over Babbitt. The bartender moved
grimly toward the crowd of two men. Babbitt followed him as de