They went, with ardor and some thoroughness, into the matters of streamline bodies, hill-climbing power, wire wheels, chrome steel, ignition systems, and body colors. It was much more than a study of transportation. It was an aspiration for knightly rank. In the city of Zenith, in the barbarous twentieth century, a family’s motor indicated its social rank as precisely as the grades of the peerage determined the rank of an English family--indeed, more precisely, considering the opinion of old county families upon newly created brewery barons and woolen-mill viscounts. The details of precedence were never officially determined. There was no court to decide whether the second son of a Pierce Arrow limousine should go in to dinner before the first son of a Buick roadster, but of their respective social importance there was no doubt; and where Babbitt as a boy had aspired to the presidency, his son Ted aspired to a Packard twin-six and an established position in the motored gentry. The favor which Babbitt had won from his family by speaking of a new car evaporated as they realized that he didn’t intend to buy one this year. Ted lamented, “Oh, punk! The old boat looks as if it’d had fleas and been scratching its varnish off.” Mrs. Babbitt said abstractedly, “Snoway talkcher father.” Babbitt raged, “If you’re too much of a high-class gentleman, and you belong to the _bon ton_ and so on, why, you needn’t take the car out this evening.” Ted explained, “I didn’t mean--” and dinner dragged on with normal domestic delight to the inevitable point at which Babbitt protested, “Come, come now, we can’t sit here all evening. Give the girl a chance to clear away the table.” He was fretting, “What a family! I don’t know how we all get to scrapping this way. Like to go off some place and be able to hear myself think.... Paul... Maine.... Wear old pants, and loaf, and cuss.” He said cautiously to his wife, “I’ve been in correspondence with a man in New York--wants me to see him about a real-estate trade--may not come off till summer. Hope it doesn’t break just when we and the Rieslings get ready to go to Maine. Be a shame if we couldn’t make the trip there together. Well, no use worrying now.” Verona escaped, immediately after dinner, with no discussion save an automatic “Why don’t you ever stay home?” from Babbitt. In the living-room, in a corner of the davenport, Ted settled down to his Home Study; plain geometry, Cicero, and the agonizing metaphors of Comus. “I don’t see why they give us this old-fashioned junk by Milton and Shakespeare and Wordsworth and all these has-beens,” he protested. “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?”