Babbitt - 17

  Each week, in rotation, four Boosters were privileged to obtain the pleasures of generosity and of publicity by donating goods or services to four fellow-members, chosen by lot. There was laughter, this week, when it was announced that one of the contributors was Barnabas Joy, the undertaker. Everybody whispered, “I can think of a coupla good guys to be buried if his donation is a free funeral!”
  
  Through all these diversions the Boosters were lunching on chicken croquettes, peas, fried potatoes, coffee, apple pie, and American cheese. Gunch did not lump the speeches. Presently he called on the visiting secretary of the Zenith Rotary Club, a rival organization. The secretary had the distinction of possessing State Motor Car License Number 5.
  
  The Rotary secretary laughingly admitted that wherever he drove in the state so low a number created a sensation, and “though it was pretty nice to have the honor, yet traffic cops remembered it only too darn well, and sometimes he didn't know but what he'd almost as soon have just plain B56,876 or something like that. Only let any doggone Booster try to get Number 5 away from a live Rotarian next year, and watch the fur fly! And if they'd permit him, he'd wind up by calling for a cheer for the Boosters and Rotarians and the Kiwanis all together!”
  
  Babbitt sighed to Professor Pumphrey, “Be pretty nice to have as low a number as that! Everybody 'd say, 'He must be an important guy!' Wonder how he got it? I'll bet he wined and dined the superintendent of the Motor License Bureau to a fare-you-well!”
  
  Then Chum Frink addressed them:
  
  “Some of you may feel that it's out of place here to talk on a strictly highbrow and artistic subject, but I want to come out flatfooted and ask you boys to O.K. the proposition of a Symphony Orchestra for Zenith. Now, where a lot of you make your mistake is in assuming that if you don't like classical music and all that junk, you ought to oppose it. Now, I want to confess that, though I'm a literary guy by profession, I don't care a rap for all this long-haired music. I'd rather listen to a good jazz band any time than to some piece by Beethoven that hasn't any more tune to it than a bunch of fighting cats, and you couldn't whistle it to save your life! But that isn't the point. Culture has become as necessary an adornment and advertisement for a city to-day as pavements or bank-clearances. It's Culture, in theaters and art-galleries and so on, that brings thousands of visitors to New York every year and, to be frank, for all our splendid attainments we haven't yet got the Culture of a New York or Chicago or Boston—or at least we don't get the credit for it. The thing to do then, as a live bunch of go-getters, is to CAPITALIZE CULTURE; to go right out and grab it.
  
  “Pictures and books are fine for those that have the time to study 'em, but they don't shoot out on the road and holler 'This is what little old Zenith can put up in the way of Culture.' That's precisely what a Symphony Orchestra does do. Look at the credit Minneapolis and Cincinnati get. An orchestra with first-class musickers and a swell conductor—and I believe we ought to do the thing up brown and get one of the highest-paid conductors on the market, providing he ain't a Hun—it goes right into Beantown and New York and Washington; it plays at the best theaters to the most cultured and moneyed people; it gives such class-advertising as a town can get in no other way; and the guy who is so short-sighted as to crab this orchestra proposition is passing up the chance to impress the glorious name of Zenith on some big New York millionaire that might-that might establish a branch factory here!
  
  “I could also go into the fact that for our daughters who show an interest in highbrow music and may want to teach it, having an A1 local organization is of great benefit, but let's keep this on a practical basis, and I call on you good brothers to whoop it up for Culture and a World-beating Symphony Orchestra!”
  
  They applauded.
  
  To a rustle of excitement President Gunch proclaimed, “Gentlemen, we will now proceed to the annual election of officers.” For each of the six offices, three candidates had been chosen by a committee. The second name among the candidates for vice-president was Babbitt's.
  
  He was surprised. He looked self-conscious. His heart pounded. He was still more agitated when the ballots were counted and Gunch said, “It's a pleasure to announce that Georgie Babbitt will be the next assistant gavel-wielder. I know of no man who stands more stanchly for common sense and enterprise than good old George. Come on, let's give him our best long yell!”
  
  As they adjourned, a hundred men crushed in to slap his back. He had never known a higher moment. He drove away in a blur of wonder. He lunged into his office, chuckling to Miss McGoun, “Well, I guess you better congratulate your boss! Been elected vice-president of the Boosters!”
  
  He was disappointed. She answered only, “Yes—Oh, Mrs. Babbitt's been trying to get you on the 'phone.” But the new salesman, Fritz Weilinger, said, “By golly, chief, say, that's great, that's perfectly great! I'm tickled to death! Congratulations!”
  
  Babbitt called the house, and crowed to his wife, “Heard you were trying to get me, Myra. Say, you got to hand it to little Georgie, this time! Better talk careful! You are now addressing the vice-president of the Boosters' Club!”
  
  “Oh, Georgie—”
  
  “Pretty nice, huh? Willis Ijams is the new president, but when he's away, little ole Georgie takes the gavel and whoops 'em up and introduces the speakers—no matter if they're the governor himself—and—”
  
  “George! Listen!”
  
  “—It puts him in solid with big men like Doc Dilling and—”
  
  “George! Paul Riesling—”
  
  “Yes, sure, I'll 'phone Paul and let him know about it right away.”
  
  “Georgie! LISTEN! Paul's in jail. He shot his wife, he shot Zilla, this noon. She may not live.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  CHAPTER XXII
  I
  
  HE drove to the City Prison, not blindly, but with unusual fussy care at corners, the fussiness of an old woman potting plants. It kept him from facing the obscenity of fate.
  
  The attendant said, “Naw, you can't see any of the prisoners till three-thirty—visiting-hour.”
  
  It was three. For half an hour Babbitt sat looking at a calendar and a clock on a whitewashed wall. The chair was hard and mean and creaky. People went through the office and, he thought, stared at him. He felt a belligerent defiance which broke into a wincing fear of this machine which was grinding Paul—Paul——
  
  Exactly at half-past three he sent in his name.
  
  The attendant returned with “Riesling says he don't want to see you.”
  
  “You're crazy! You didn't give him my name! Tell him it's George wants to see him, George Babbitt.”
  
  “Yuh, I told him, all right, all right! He said he didn't want to see you.”
  
  “Then take me in anyway.”
  
  “Nothing doing. If you ain't his lawyer, if he don't want to see you, that's all there is to it.”
  
  “But, my GOD—Say, let me see the warden.”
  
  “He's busy. Come on, now, you—” Babbitt reared over him. The attendant hastily changed to a coaxing “You can come back and try to-morrow. Probably the poor guy is off his nut.”
  
  Babbitt drove, not at all carefully or fussily, sliding viciously past trucks, ignoring the truckmen's curses, to the City Hall; he stopped with a grind of wheels against the curb, and ran up the marble steps to the office of the Hon. Mr. Lucas Prout, the mayor. He bribed the mayor's doorman with a dollar; he was instantly inside, demanding, “You remember me, Mr. Prout? Babbitt—vice-president of the Boosters—campaigned for you? Say, have you heard about poor Riesling? Well, I want an order on the warden or whatever you call um of the City Prison to take me back and see him. Good. Thanks.”
  
  In fifteen minutes he was pounding down the prison corridor to a cage where Paul Riesling sat on a cot, twisted like an old beggar, legs crossed, arms in a knot, biting at his clenched fist.
  
  Paul looked up blankly as the keeper unlocked the cell, admitted Babbitt, and left them together. He spoke slowly: “Go on! Be moral!”
  
  Babbitt plumped on the couch beside him. “I'm not going to be moral! I don't care what happened! I just want to do anything I can. I'm glad Zilla got what was coming to her.”
  
  Paul said argumentatively, “Now, don't go jumping on Zilla. I've been thinking; maybe she hasn't had any too easy a time. Just after I shot her—I didn't hardly mean to, but she got to deviling me so I went crazy, just for a second, and pulled out that old revolver you and I used to shoot rabbits with, and took a crack at her. Didn't hardly mean to—After that, when I was trying to stop the blood—It was terrible what it did to her shoulder, and she had beautiful skin—Maybe she won't die. I hope it won't leave her skin all scarred. But just afterward, when I was hunting through the bathroom for some cotton to stop the blood, I ran onto a little fuzzy yellow duck we hung on the tree one Christmas, and I remembered she and I'd been awfully happy then—Hell. I can't hardly believe it's me here.” As Babbitt's arm tightened about his shoulder, Paul sighed, “I'm glad you came. But I thought maybe you'd lecture me, and when you've committed a murder, and been brought here and everything—there was a big crowd outside the apartment house, all staring, and the cops took me through it—Oh, I'm not going to talk about it any more.”
  
  But he went on, in a monotonous, terrified insane mumble. To divert him Babbitt said, “Why, you got a scar on your cheek.”
  
  “Yes. That's where the cop hit me. I suppose cops get a lot of fun out of lecturing murderers, too. He was a big fellow. And they wouldn't let me help carry Zilla down to the ambulance.”
  
  “Paul! Quit it! Listen: she won't die, and when it's all over you and I'll go off to Maine again. And maybe we can get that May Arnold to go along. I'll go up to Chicago and ask her. Good woman, by golly. And afterwards I'll see that you get started in business out West somewhere, maybe Seattle—they say that's a lovely city.”
  
  Paul was half smiling. It was Babbitt who rambled now. He could not tell whether Paul was heeding, but he droned on till the coming of Paul's lawyer, P. J. Maxwell, a thin, busy, unfriendly man who nodded at Babbitt and hinted, “If Riesling and I could be alone for a moment—”
  
  Babbitt wrung Paul's hands, and waited in the office till Maxwell came pattering out. “Look, old man, what can I do?” he begged.
  
  “Nothing. Not a thing. Not just now,” said Maxwell. “Sorry. Got to hurry. And don't try to see him. I've had the doctor give him a shot of morphine, so he'll sleep.”
  
  It seemed somehow wicked to return to the office. Babbitt felt as though he had just come from a funeral. He drifted out to the City Hospital to inquire about Zilla. She was not likely to die, he learned. The bullet from Paul's huge old .44 army revolver had smashed her shoulder and torn upward and out.
  
  He wandered home and found his wife radiant with the horified interest we have in the tragedies of our friends. “Of course Paul isn't altogether to blame, but this is what comes of his chasing after other women instead of bearing his cross in a Christian way,” she exulted.
  
  He was too languid to respond as he desired. He said what was to be said about the Christian bearing of crosses, and went out to clean the car. Dully, patiently, he scraped linty grease from the drip-pan, gouged at the mud caked on the wheels. He used up many minutes in washing his hands; scoured them with gritty kitchen soap; rejoiced in hurting his plump knuckles. “Damn soft hands—like a woman's. Aah!”
  
  At dinner, when his wife began the inevitable, he bellowed, “I forbid any of you to say a word about Paul! I'll 'tend to all the talking about this that's necessary, hear me? There's going to be one house in this scandal-mongering town to-night that isn't going to spring the holier-than-thou. And throw those filthy evening papers out of the house!”
  
  But he himself read the papers, after dinner.
  
  Before nine he set out for the house of Lawyer Maxwell. He was received without cordiality. “Well?” said Maxwell.
  
  “I want to offer my services in the trial. I've got an idea. Why couldn't I go on the stand and swear I was there, and she pulled the gun first and he wrestled with her and the gun went off accidentally?”
  
  “And perjure yourself?”
  
  “Huh? Yes, I suppose it would be perjury. Oh—Would it help?”
  
  “But, my dear fellow! Perjury!”
  
  “Oh, don't be a fool! Excuse me, Maxwell; I didn't mean to get your goat. I just mean: I've known and you've known many and many a case of perjury, just to annex some rotten little piece of real estate, and here where it's a case of saving Paul from going to prison, I'd perjure myself black in the face.”
  
  “No. Aside from the ethics of the matter, I'm afraid it isn't practicable. The prosecutor would tear your testimony to pieces. It's known that only Riesling and his wife were there at the time.”
  
  “Then, look here! Let me go on the stand and swear—and this would be the God's truth—that she pestered him till he kind of went crazy.”
  
  “No. Sorry. Riesling absolutely refuses to have any testimony reflecting on his wife. He insists on pleading guilty.”
  
  “Then let me get up and testify something—whatever you say. Let me do SOMETHING!”
  
  “I'm sorry, Babbitt, but the best thing you can do—I hate to say it, but you could help us most by keeping strictly out of it.”
  
  Babbitt, revolving his hat like a defaulting poor tenant, winced so visibly that Maxwell condescended:
  
  “I don't like to hurt your feelings, but you see we both want to do our best for Riesling, and we mustn't consider any other factor. The trouble with you, Babbitt, is that you're one of these fellows who talk too readily. You like to hear your own voice. If there were anything for which I could put you in the witness-box, you'd get going and give the whole show away. Sorry. Now I must look over some papers—So sorry.”
  
  II
  
  He spent most of the next morning nerving himself to face the garrulous world of the Athletic Club. They would talk about Paul; they would be lip-licking and rotten. But at the Roughnecks' Table they did not mention Paul. They spoke with zeal of the coming baseball season. He loved them as he never had before.
  
  III
  
  He had, doubtless from some story-book, pictured Paul's trial as a long struggle, with bitter arguments, a taut crowd, and sudden and overwhelming new testimony. Actually, the trial occupied less than fifteen minutes, largely filled with the evidence of doctors that Zilla would recover and that Paul must have been temporarily insane. Next day Paul was sentenced to three years in the State Penitentiary and taken off—quite undramatically, not handcuffed, merely plodding in a tired way beside a cheerful deputy sheriff—and after saying good-by to him at the station Babbitt returned to his office to realize that he faced a world which, without Paul, was meaningless.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  CHAPTER XXIII
  I
  
  HE was busy, from March to June. He kept himself from the bewilderment of thinking. His wife and the neighbors were generous. Every evening he played bridge or attended the movies, and the days were blank of face and silent.
  
  In June, Mrs. Babbitt and Tinka went East, to stay with relatives, and Babbitt was free to do—he was not quite sure what.
  
  All day long after their departure he thought of the emancipated house in which he could, if he desired, go mad and curse the gods without having to keep up a husbandly front. He considered, “I could have a reg'lar party to-night; stay out till two and not do any explaining afterwards. Cheers!” He telephoned to Vergil Gunch, to Eddie Swanson. Both of them were engaged for the evening, and suddenly he was bored by having to take so much trouble to be riotous.
  
  He was silent at dinner, unusually kindly to Ted and Verona, hesitating but not disapproving when Verona stated her opinion of Kenneth Escott's opinion of Dr. John Jennison Drew's opinion of the opinions of the evolutionists. Ted was working in a garage through the summer vacation, and he related his daily triumphs: how he had found a cracked ball-race, what he had said to the Old Grouch, what he had said to the foreman about the future of wireless telephony.
  
  Ted and Verona went to a dance after dinner. Even the maid was out. Rarely had Babbitt been alone in the house for an entire evening. He was restless. He vaguely wanted something more diverting than the newspaper comic strips to read. He ambled up to Verona's room, sat on her maidenly blue and white bed, humming and grunting in a solid-citizen manner as he examined her books: Conrad's “Rescue,” a volume strangely named “Figures of Earth,” poetry (quite irregular poetry, Babbitt thought) by Vachel Lindsay, and essays by H. L. Mencken—highly improper essays, making fun of the church and all the decencies. He liked none of the books. In them he felt a spirit of rebellion against niceness and solid-citizenship. These authors—and he supposed they were famous ones, too—did not seem to care about telling a good story which would enable a fellow to forget his troubles. He sighed. He noted a book, “The Three Black Pennies,” by Joseph Hergesheimer. Ah, that was something like it! It would be an adventure story, maybe about counterfeiting—detectives sneaking up on the old house at night. He tucked the book under his arm, he clumped down-stairs and solemnly began to read, under the piano-lamp:
  
  “A twilight like blue dust sifted into the shallow fold of the thickly wooded hills. It was early October, but a crisping frost had already stamped the maple trees with gold, the Spanish oaks were hung with patches of wine red, the sumach was brilliant in the darkening underbrush. A pattern of wild geese, flying low and unconcerned above the hills, wavered against the serene ashen evening. Howat Penny, standing in the comparative clearing of a road, decided that the shifting regular flight would not come close enough for a shot.... He had no intention of hunting the geese. With the drooping of day his keenness had evaporated; an habitual indifference strengthened, permeating him....”
  
  There it was again: discontent with the good common ways. Babbitt laid down the book and listened to the stillness. The inner doors of the house were open. He heard from the kitchen the steady drip of the refrigerator, a rhythm demanding and disquieting. He roamed to the window. The summer evening was foggy and, seen through the wire screen, the street lamps were crosses of pale fire. The whole world was abnormal. While he brooded, Verona and Ted came in and went up to bed. Silence thickened in the sleeping house. He put on his hat, his respectable derby, lighted a cigar, and walked up and down before the house, a portly, worthy, unimaginative figure, humming “Silver Threads among the Gold.” He casually considered, “Might call up Paul.” Then he remembered. He saw Paul in a jailbird's uniform, but while he agonized he didn't believe the tale. It was part of the unreality of this fog-enchanted evening.
  
  If she were here Myra would be hinting, “Isn't it late, Georgie?” He tramped in forlorn and unwanted freedom. Fog hid the house now. The world was uncreated, a chaos without turmoil or desire.
  
  Through the mist came a man at so feverish a pace that he seemed to dance with fury as he entered the orb of glow from a street-lamp. At each step he brandished his stick and brought it down with a crash. His glasses on their broad pretentious ribbon banged against his stomach. Babbitt incredulously saw that it was Chum Frink.
  
  Frink stopped, focused his vision, and spoke with gravity:
  
  “There's another fool. George Babbitt. Lives for renting howshes—houses. Know who I am? I'm traitor to poetry. I'm drunk. I'm talking too much. I don't care. Know what I could 've been? I could 've been a Gene Field or a James Whitcomb Riley. Maybe a Stevenson. I could 've. Whimsies. 'Magination. Lissen. Lissen to this. Just made it up:
  
  Glittering summery meadowy noise Of beetles and bums and respectable boys.
  
  Hear that? Whimzh—whimsy. I made that up. I don't know what it means! Beginning good verse. Chile's Garden Verses. And whadi write? Tripe! Cheer-up poems. All tripe! Could have written—Too late!”
  
  He darted on with an alarming plunge, seeming always to pitch forward yet never quite falling. Babbitt would have been no more astonished and no less had a ghost skipped out of the fog carrying his head. He accepted Frink with vast apathy; he grunted, “Poor boob!” and straightway forgot him.
  
  He plodded into the house, deliberately went to the refrigerator and rifled it. When Mrs. Babbitt was at home, this was one of the major household crimes. He stood before the covered laundry tubs, eating a chicken leg and half a saucer of raspberry jelly, and grumbling over a clammy cold boiled potato. He was thinking. It was coming to him that perhaps all life as he knew it and vigorously practised it was futile; that heaven as portrayed by the Reverend Dr. John Jennison Drew was neither probable nor very interesting; that he hadn't much pleasure out of making money; that it was of doubtful worth to rear children merely that they might rear children who would rear children. What was it all about? What did he want?
  
  He blundered into the living-room, lay on the davenport, hands behind his head.
  
  What did he want? Wealth? Social position? Travel? Servants? Yes, but only incidentally.
  
  “I give it up,” he sighed.
  
  But he did know that he wanted the presence of Paul Riesling; and from that he stumbled into the admission that he wanted the fairy girl—in the flesh. If there had been a woman whom he loved, he would have fled to her, humbled his forehead on her knees.
  
  He thought of his stenographer, Miss McGoun. He thought of the prettiest of the manicure girls at the Hotel Thornleigh barber shop. As he fell asleep on the davenport he felt that he had found something in life, and that he had made a terrifying, thrilling break with everything that was decent and normal.
  
  II
  
  He had forgotten, next morning, that he was a conscious rebel, but he was irritable in the office and at the eleven o'clock drive of telephone calls and visitors he did something he had often desired and never dared: he left the office without excuses to those slave-drivers his employees, and went to the movies. He enjoyed the right to be alone. He came out with a vicious determination to do what he pleased.
  
  As he approached the Roughnecks' Table at the club, everybody laughed.
  
  “Well, here's the millionaire!” said Sidney Finkelstein.
  
  “Yes, I saw him in his Locomobile!” said Professor Pumphrey.
  
  “Gosh, it must be great to be a smart guy like Georgie!” moaned Vergil Gunch. “He's probably stolen all of Dorchester. I'd hate to leave a poor little defenseless piece of property lying around where he could get his hooks on it!”
  
  They had, Babbitt perceived, “something on him.” Also, they “had their kidding clothes on.” Ordinarily he would have been delighted at the honor implied in being chaffed, but he was suddenly touchy. He grunted, “Yuh, sure; maybe I'll take you guys on as office boys!” He was impatient as the jest elaborately rolled on to its denouement.
  
  “Of course he may have been meeting a girl,” they said, and “No, I think he was waiting for his old roommate, Sir Jerusalem Doak.”
  
  He exploded, “Oh, spring it, spring it, you boneheads! What's the great joke?”
  
  “Hurray! George is peeved!” snickered Sidney Finkelstein, while a grin went round the table. Gunch revealed the shocking truth: He had seen Babbitt coming out of a motion-picture theater—at noon!
  
  They kept it up. With a hundred variations, a hundred guffaws, they said that he had gone to the movies during business-hours. He didn't so much mind Gunch, but he was annoyed by Sidney Finkelstein, that brisk, lean, red-headed explainer of jokes. He was bothered, too, by the lump of ice in his glass of water. It was too large; it spun round and burned his nose when he tried to drink. He raged that Finkelstein was like that lump of ice. But he won through; he kept up his banter till they grew tired of the superlative jest and turned to the great problems of the day.
  
  He reflected, “What's the matter with me to-day? Seems like I've got an awful grouch. Only they talk so darn much. But I better steer careful and keep my mouth shut.”
  
  As they lighted their cigars he mumbled, “Got to get back,” and on a chorus of “If you WILL go spending your mornings with lady ushers at the movies!” he escaped. He heard them giggling. He was embarrassed. While he was most bombastically agreeing with the coat-man that the weather was warm, he was conscious that he was longing to run childishly with his troubles to the comfort of the fairy child.
  
  III
  
  He kept Miss McGoun after he had finished dictating. He searched for a topic which would warm her office impersonality into friendliness.
  
  “Where you going on your vacation?” he purred.
  
  “I think I'll go up-state to a farm do you want me to have the Siddons lease copied this afternoon?”
  
  “Oh, no hurry about it.... I suppose you have a great time when you get away from us cranks in the office.”
  
  She rose and gathered her pencils. “Oh, nobody's cranky here I think I can get it copied after I do the letters.”
  
  She was gone. Babbitt utterly repudiated the view that he had been trying to discover how approachable was Miss McGoun. “Course! knew there was nothing doing!” he said.
  
  IV
  
  Eddie Swanson, the motor-car agent who lived across the street from Babbitt, was giving a Sunday supper. His wife Louetta, young Louetta who loved jazz in music and in clothes and laughter, was at her wildest. She cried, “We'll have a real party!” as she received the guests. Babbitt had uneasily felt that to many men she might be alluring; now he admitted that to himself she was overwhelmingly alluring. Mrs. Babbitt had never quite approved of Louetta; Babbitt was glad that she was not here this evening.
  
  He insisted on helping Louetta in the kitchen: taking the chicken croquettes from the warming-oven, the lettuce sandwiches from the ice-box. He held her hand, once, and she depressingly didn't notice it. She caroled, “You're a good little mother's-helper, Georgie. Now trot in with the tray and leave it on the side-table.”
  
  He wished that Eddie Swanson would give them cocktails; that Louetta would have one. He wanted—Oh, he wanted to be one of these Bohemians you read about. Studio parties. Wild lovely girls who were independent. Not necessarily bad. Certainly not! But not tame, like Floral Heights. How he'd ever stood it all these years—
  
  Eddie did not give them cocktails. True, they supped with mirth, and with several repetitions by Orville Jones of “Any time Louetta wants to come sit on my lap I'll tell this sandwich to beat it!” but they were respectable, as befitted Sunday evening. Babbitt had discreetly preempted a place beside Louetta on the piano bench. While he talked about motors, while he listened with a fixed smile to her account of the film she had seen last Wednesday, while he hoped that she would hurry up and finish her description of the plot, the beauty of the leading man, and the luxury of the setting, he studied her. Slim waist girdled with raw silk, strong brows, ardent eyes, hair parted above a broad forehead—she meant youth to him and a charm which saddened. He thought of how valiant a companion she would be on a long motor tour, exploring mountains, picnicking in a pine grove high above a valley. Her frailness touched him; he was angry at Eddie Swanson for the incessant family bickering. All at once he identified Louetta with the fairy girl. He was startled by the conviction that they had always had a romantic attraction for each other.
  
  “I suppose you're leading a simply terrible life, now you're a widower,” she said.
  
  “You bet! I'm a bad little fellow and proud of it. Some evening you slip Eddie some dope in his coffee and sneak across the road and I'll show you how to mix a cocktail,” he roared.
  
  “Well, now, I might do it! You never can tell!”
  
  “Well, whenever you're ready, you just hang a towel out of the attic window and I'll jump for the gin!”
  
  Every one giggled at this naughtiness. In a pleased way Eddie Swanson stated that he would have a physician analyze his coffee daily. The others were diverted to a discussion of the more agreeable recent murders, but Babbitt drew Louetta back to personal things:
  
  “That's the prettiest dress I ever saw in my life.”
  
  “Do you honestly like it?”
  
  “Like it? Why, say, I'm going to have Kenneth Escott put a piece in the paper saying that the swellest dressed woman in the U. S. is Mrs. E. Louetta Swanson.”
  
  “Now, you stop teasing me!” But she beamed. “Let's dance a little. George, you've got to dance with me.”
  
  Even as he protested, “Oh, you know what a rotten dancer I am!” he was lumbering to his feet.
  
  “I'll teach you. I can teach anybody.”