He marched upon them: Verona, a dumpy brown-haired girl of twenty-two, just out of Bryn Mawr, given to solicitudes about duty and sex and God and the unconquerable bagginess of the gray sports-suit she was now wearing. Ted--Theodore Roosevelt Babbitt--a decorative boy of seventeen. Tinka--Katherine--still a baby at ten, with radiant red hair and a thin skin which hinted of too much candy and too many ice cream sodas. Babbitt did not show his vague irritation as he tramped in. He really disliked being a family tyrant, and his nagging was as meaningless as it was frequent. He shouted at Tinka, “Well, kittiedoolie!” It was the only pet name in his vocabulary, except the “dear” and “hon.” with which he recognized his wife, and he flung it at Tinka every morning. He gulped a cup of coffee in the hope of pacifying his stomach and his soul. His stomach ceased to feel as though it did not belong to him, but Verona began to be conscientious and annoying, and abruptly there returned to Babbitt the doubts regarding life and families and business which had clawed at him when his dream-life and the slim fairy girl had fled. Verona had for six months been filing-clerk at the Gruensberg Leather Company offices, with a prospect of becoming secretary to Mr. Gruensberg and thus, as Babbitt defined it, “getting some good out of your expensive college education till you’re ready to marry and settle down.” But now said Verona: “Father! I was talking to a classmate of mine that’s working for the Associated Charities--oh, Dad, there’s the sweetest little babies that come to the milk-station there!--and I feel as though I ought to be doing something worth while like that.” “What do you mean ‘worth while’? If you get to be Gruensberg’s secretary--and maybe you would, if you kept up your shorthand and didn’t go sneaking off to concerts and talk-fests every evening--I guess you’ll find thirty-five or forty bones a week worth while!” “I know, but--oh, I want to--contribute-- I wish I were working in a settlement-house. I wonder if I could get one of the department-stores to let me put in a welfare-department with a nice rest-room and chintzes and wicker chairs and so on and so forth. Or I could--”