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nd face smooth and streamy and his eyes stinging from soapy water, he reached for a towel. The family towels were wet, wet and clammy and vile, all of them wet, he found, as he blindly snatched them--his own face-towel, his wifes, Veronas, Teds, Tinkas, and the lone bath-towel with the huge welt of initial. Then George F. Babbitt did a dismaying thing. He wiped his face on the guest-towel! It was a pansy-embroidered trifle which always hung there to indicate that the Babbitts were in the best Floral Heights society. No one had ever used it. No guest had ever dared to. Guests secretively took a corner of the nearest regular towel. He was raging, "By golly, here they go and use up all the towels, every doggone one of em, and they use em and get em all wet and sopping, and never put out a dry one for me--of course, Im the goat!--and then I want one and-- Im the only person in the doggone house thats got the slightest doggone bit of consideration for other people and thoughtfulness and consider there may be others that may want to use the doggone bathroom after me and consider--" He was pitching the chill abominations into the bath-tub, pleased by the vindictiveness of that desolate flapping sound; and in the midst his wife serenely trotted in, observed serenely, "Why Georgie dear, what are you doing? Are you going to wash out the towels? Why, you neednt wash out the towels. Oh, Georgie, you didnt go and use the guest-towel, did you?" It is not recorded that he was able to answer. For the first time in weeks he was sufficiently roused by his wife to look at her. IV Myra Babbitt--Mrs. George F. Babbitt--was definitely mature. She had creases from the corners of her mouth to the bottom of her chin, and her plump neck bagged. But the thing that marked her as having passed the line was that she no longer had reticences before her husband, and no longer worried about not having reticences. She was in a petticoat now, and corsets which bulged, and unaware of being seen in bulgy corsets. She had become so dully habituated to married life that in her full matronliness she was as sexless as an anemic nun. She was a good woman, a kind woman, a diligent woman, but no one, save perhaps Tinka her ten-year-old, was at all interested in her or entirely aware that she was alive. After a rather thorough discussion of all the domestic and social aspects of towels she apologized to Babbitt for his having an alcoholic headache; and he recovered enough to endure the search for a undershirt which had, he pointed out, malevolently been concealed among his clean pajamas. He was fairly amiable in the conference on the brown suit. "What do you think, Myra?" He pawed at the clothes hunched on a chair in their bedroom, while she moved about mysteriously adjusting and patting her petticoat and, to his jaundiced eye, never seeming to get on with her dressing. "How about it? Shall I wear the brown suit another day?" "Well, it looks awfully nice on you." "I know, but gosh, it needs pressing." "Thats so. Perhaps it does." "It certainly could stand being pressed, all right." "Yes, perhaps it wouldnt hurt it to be pressed." "But gee, the coat doesnt need pressing. No sense in having the whole darn suit pressed, when the coat doesnt need it." "Thats so." "But the pants certainly need it, all right. Look at them--look at those wrinkles--the pants certainly do need pressing." "Thats so. Oh, Georgie, why couldnt you wear the brown coat with the blue trousers we were wondering what wed do with them?" "Good Lord! Did you ever in all my life know me to wear the coat of one suit and the pants of another? What do you think I am? A busted bookkeeper?" "Well, why dont you put on the dark gray suit to-day, and stop in at the tailor and leave the brown trousers?" "Well, they certainly need--Now where the devil is that gray suit? Oh, yes, here we are." He was able to get through the other crises of dressing with comparative resoluteness and calm. His first adornment was the sleeveless dimity undershirt, in which he resembled a small boy humorlessly wearing a cheesecloth tabard at a civic pageant. He never put on without thanking the God of Progress that he didnt wear tight, long, old-fashioned undergarments, like his father-in-law and partner, Henry Thompson. His second embellishment was combing and slicking back his hair. It gave him a tremendous forehead, arching up two inches beyond the former hair-line. But most wonder-working of all was the donning of his spectacles. There is character in spectacles--the pretentious tortoiseshell, the meek pince-nez of the school teacher, the twisted silver-framed glasses of the old villager. Babbitts spectacles had huge, circular, frameless lenses of the very best glass; the ear-pieces were thin bars of gold. In them he was the modern business man; one who gave orders to clerks and drove a car and played occasional golf and was scholarly in regard to Salesmanship. His head suddenly appeared no