To George F. Babbitt, as to most prosperous citizens of Zenith, his motor car was poetry and tragedy, love and heroism. The office was his pirate ship but the car his perilous excursion ashore.

Then George F. Babbitt did a dismaying thing. He wiped his face in the guest towel!

His name was George F. Babbitt. He was forty-six years old now, in April, 1920, and he made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry, but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.

On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy has given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had.

In twenty-three years of married life, Mrs. Babbitt had seen the paper before her husband just sixty-seven times.

In fact there was but one thing wrong with the Babbitt house: It was not a home.

Though the house was not large it had, like all houses in Floral Heights, an altogether royal bathroom of porcelain and glazed tile and metal sleek as silver.

In twenty-three years of married life he had peered uneasily at every graceful ankle, every soft shoulder; in thought he had treasured them; but not once had he hazarded respectability by adventuring.

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.

He stopped smoking at least once a month. He went through with it like the solid citizen he was: admitted the evils of tobacco, courageously made resolves, laid out plans to check the vice, tapered off his allowance of cigars, and expounded the pleasures of virtuousness to every one he met. He did everything, in fact, except stop smoking.