RELIEVED of Babbitt's bumbling and the soft grunts with which his wife expressed the
sympathy she was too experienced to feel and much too experienced not to show, their
bedroom settled instantly into impersonality.
It gave on the sleeping-porch. It served both of them as dressing-room, and on the coldest nights Babbitt luxuriously gave up the duty of being manly and retreated to the bed inside, to curl his toes in the warmth and laugh at the
January gale.
The room displayed a modest and pleasant color-scheme, after one of the best standard designs of the decorator who "did the interiors" for most of the speculative-builders' houses in
Zenith. The walls were gray, the woodwork white, the rug a serene blue; and very much like
mahogany was the furniture--the bureau with its great clear mirror, Mrs. Babbitt's dressing-table with toilet-articles of almost solid
silver, the plain twin
beds, between them a small table holding a standard electric bedside
lamp, a glass for water, and a standard bedside book with colored illustrations--what particular book it was cannot be ascertained, since no one had ever opened it. The
mattresses were firm but not hard, triumphant modern mattresses which had cost a great deal of money; the hot-water
radiator was of exactly the proper
scientific surface for the cubic contents of the room. The windows were large and easily opened, with the best catches and cords, and
Holland roller-shades guaranteed not to crack. It was a masterpiece among bedrooms, right out of
Cheerful Modern Houses for Medium Incomes. Only it had nothing to do with the Babbitts, nor with any one else. If people had ever lived and loved here, read thrillers at midnight and lain in beautiful indolence on a Sunday
morning, there were no signs of it. It had the air of being a very good room in a very good hotel. One expected the
chambermaid to come in and make it ready for people who would stay but one night, go without looking back, and
never think of it again.
Every second house in Floral Heights had a bedroom precisely like this.
The Babbitts' house was five years old. It was all as competent and glossy as this bedroom. It had the best of taste, the best of inexpensive rugs, a simple and laudable
architecture, and the latest conveniences. Throughout,
electricity took the place of candles and slatternly hearth-fires. Along the bedroom baseboard were three plugs for electric lamps, concealed by little brass doors. In the halls were plugs for the
vacuum cleaner, and in the living-room plugs for the piano lamp, for the electric fan. The trim
dining-room (with its admirable oak
buffet, its leaded-glass cupboard, its
creamy plaster walls, its modest scene of a
salmon expiring upon a pile of
oysters) had plugs which supplied the electric
percolator and the electric
toaster.
In fact there was but one thing wrong with the Babbitt house: It was not a
home.
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