HE solemnly finished the last copy of the American Magazine, while his wife sighed, laid away her darning, and looked enviously¹ at the lingerie designs in a women's magazine. The room was very still.

 

It was a room which observed the best Floral Heights standards. The gray walls were divided into artificial paneling by strips of white-enameled pine. From the Babbitts' former house had come two much-carved rocking-chairs, but the other chairs were new, very deep and restful, upholstered in blue and gold-striped velvet². A blue velvet davenport faced the fireplace, and behind it was a cherrywood table and a tall piano-lamp with a shade of golden silk. (Two out of every three houses in Floral Heights had before the fireplace a davenport, a mahogany table real or imitation, and a piano-lamp or a reading-lamp with a shade of yellow or rose silk.)

 

On the table was a runner of gold-threaded Chinese fabric⁴, four magazines, a silver box containing cigarette-crumbs, and three “gift-books”—large, expensive editions of fairy-tales illustrated⁵ by English artists and as yet unread by any Babbitt save Tinka.

 

In a corner by the front windows was a large cabinet Victrola. (Eight out of every nine Floral Heights houses had a cabinet phonograph.)

 

Among the pictures, hung in the exact center of each gray panel, were a red and black imitation English hunting-print, an anemic imitation boudoir-print with a French caption⁷ of whose morality Babbitt had always been rather suspicious, and a “hand-colored” photograph of a Colonial room—rag rug, maiden⁸ spinning, cat demure⁹ before a white fireplace. (Nineteen out of every twenty houses in Floral Heights had either a hunting-print, a Madame Feit la Toilette print, a colored photograph of a New England house, a photograph of a Rocky Mountain, or all four.)

 

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