On the night of the party he was permitted to look on, when he was not helping Matilda with the Vecchia ice cream and the petits fours. He was deeply disquieted. Eight years ago, when Verona had given a high-school party, the children had been featureless babies. Now they were men and women of the world, very supercilious men and women; the boys condescended to Babbitt, they wore evening-clothes, and with hauteur they accepted cigarettes from silver cases. Babbitt had heard stories of what the Athletic Club called “goings-on” at young parties; of girls “parking” their corsets in the dressing-room, of “cuddling” and “petting,” and a presumable increase in what was known as Immorality. To-night he believed the stories. These children seemed bold to him, and cold. The girls wore misty chiffon, coral velvet, or cloth of gold, and around their dipping bobbed hair were shining wreaths. He had it, upon urgent and secret inquiry, that no corsets were known to be parked upstairs; but certainly these eager bodies were not stiff with steel. Their stockings were of lustrous silk, their slippers costly and unnatural, their lips carmined and their eyebrows penciled. They danced cheek to cheek with the boys, and Babbitt sickened with apprehension and unconscious envy.
Worst of them all was Eunice Littlefield, and maddest of all the boys was Ted. Eunice was a flying demon. She slid the length of the room; her tender shoulders swayed; her feet were deft as a weaver’s shuttle; she laughed, and enticed Babbitt to dance with her.
Then he discovered the annex to the party.
The boys and girls disappeared occasionally, and he remembered rumors of their drinking together from hip-pocket flasks. He tiptoed round the house, and in each of the dozen cars waiting in the street he saw the points of light from cigarettes, from each of them heard high giggles. He wanted to denounce them but (standing in the snow, peering round the dark corner) he did not dare. He tried to be tactful. When he had returned to the front hall he coaxed the boys, “Say, if any of you fellows are thirsty, there’s some dandy ginger ale.”
“Oh! Thanks!” they condescended.
He sought his wife, in the pantry, and exploded, “I’d like to go in there and throw some of those young pups out of the house! They talk down to me like I was the butler! I’d like to—”
“I know,” she sighed; “only everybody says, all the mothers tell me, unless you stand for them, if you get angry because they go out to their cars to have a drink, they won’t come to your house any more, and we wouldn’t want Ted left out of things, would we?”
He announced that he would be enchanted to have Ted left out of things, and hurried in to be polite, lest Ted be left out of things.
But, he resolved, if he found that the boys were drinking, he would—well, he’d “hand ’em something that would surprise ’em.” While he was trying to be agreeable to large-shouldered young bullies he was earnestly sniffing at them. Twice he caught the reek of prohibition-time whisky, but then, it was only twice—
Dr. Howard Littlefield lumbered in.