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I don't believe that outside of the office and playing a little bum golf on Saturday he knows there's anything in the world to do except just keep sitting there-sitting there every night not wanting to go anywhere not wanting to do anything thinking us kids are crazy sitting there Lord!" If he was frightened by Ted's slackness, Babbitt was not sufficiently frightened by Verona. She was too safe.
Edwin Babbitt, a pioneer in this line in the Western world, gave the general principles in a nutshell, when he laid down the following rule: "There is a trianal series of graduations in the peculiar potencies of colors, the center and climax of electrical action, which cools the nerves, being in violet; the climax of electrical action, which is soothing to the vascular system, being in blue; the climax of luminosity being in yellow; and the climax of thermism or heat being in red.
Jed was speechless. Babbitt, looking like a triumphantly vicious Bantam rooster, crowed on. "You don't seem to be quite so sassy and talky as you was when I first came in, Shavin's," he sneered. "Guess likely YOU ain't feelin' well now . . . eh? Do you remember what I told you last time I was in this shop? I told you I'd pay my debts to you and Sam Hunniwell if I waited fifty year.
The Advocate-Times reported the lecture so fully that Vergil Gunch said to Babbitt, "You're getting to be one of the classiest spellbinders in town. Seems 's if I couldn't pick up a paper without reading about your well-known eloquence. All this guff ought to bring a lot of business into your office. Good work! Keep it up!"
Babbitt said he was under foot, and Matilda and the maid hired for the evening brushed by him, elbowed him, shrieked "Pleasopn door," as they tottered through with trays, but in this high moment he ignored them. Besides the new bottle of gin, his cellar consisted of one half-bottle of Bourbon whisky, a quarter of a bottle of Italian vermouth, and approximately one hundred drops of orange bitters.
"Oh, I guess I could stand it to see a show by Shakespeare, if they had swell scenery and put on a lot of dog, but to sit down in cold blood and READ 'em These teachers how do they get that way?" Mrs. Babbitt, darning socks, speculated, "Yes, I wonder why.
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.
The motor raced for the climb up into the garage and raced once more, explosively, before it was shut off. A final opening and slamming of the car door. Silence then, a horrible silence filled with waiting, till the leisurely Mr. Doppelbrau had examined the state of his tires and had at last shut the garage door. Instantly, for Babbitt, a blessed state of oblivion.
Oh you Folly!" President Ijams continued: "That, gentlemen, is the awful thing Georgie Babbitt has been concealing all these years, when we thought he was just plain George F. Now I want you to tell us, taking it in turn, what you've always supposed the F. stood for." Flivver, they suggested, and Frog-face and Flathead and Farinaceous and Freezone and Flapdoodle and Foghorn.
He told them all about those subjects, together with three funny stories about European misconceptions of America and some spirited words on the necessity of keeping ignorant foreigners out of America. "Say, that was a mighty informative talk. Real he-stuff," said Sidney Finkelstein. But the disaffected Babbitt grumbled, "Four-flusher! Bunch of hot air! And what's the matter with the immigrants?
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