RELIEVED of Babbitt's bumbling and the soft grunts¹ 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 impersonality².

 

It gave on the sleeping-porch. It served both of them as dressing-room, and on the coldest nights Babbitt luxuriously³ gave up the duty of being manly⁴ and retreated to the bed inside, to curl his toes in the warmth and laugh at the January gale⁶.

 

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 serene⁷ 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 ascertained⁸, since no one had ever opened it. The mattresses⁹ were firm but not hard, triumphant¹⁰ modern mattresses which had cost a great deal of money; the hot-water radiator¹¹ 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

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