But she woke at night to hovering death. She crept away from the bump of bedding that was Kennicott, tiptoed into the bathroom and, by the mirror in the door of the medicine-cabinet, examined her pallid face. Wasn’t she growing visibly older in ratio as Vida grew plumper and younger? Wasn’t her nose sharper? Wasn’t her neck granulated? She stared and choked. She was only thirty. But the five years since her marriage--had they not gone by as hastily and stupidly as though she had been under ether? Would time not slink past till death? She pounded her fist on the cool enameled rim of the bathtub and raged mutely against the indifference of the gods: “I don’t care! I won’t endure it! They lie so ..., they tell me I ought to be satisfied with Hugh and a good home and planting seven nasturtiums in a station garden! I am I! When I die the world will be annihilated, as far as I am concerned. I am I! I am not content to leave the sea and the ivory towers to others. I want them for me! Damn all of them! Do they think they can make me believe that a display of potatoes at Howland and Gould’s is enough beauty and strangeness?” The last words of this romantic soliloquy show too well, alas! by their triviality that Carol is only a Middle Western Bovary, but the tone and the pathos of the piece are worthy of the best pages in Flaubert. Salammbô, praying to the moon on her Carthaginian terrace, Emma giving way to her blues in her boudoir, would have understood the melancholy Carol dreaming of Babylon in a Gopher Prairie garden. * * * * * I now turn to “Babbitt.” The author’s literary tactics have changed since he wrote “Free Air” and “Our Mr. Wrenn.” Plots have now given way almost entirely to portraits, anecdotes to characters. Sinclair Lewis’ tactics consist in heaping together the minutest details which will help him to put a vital person before us. His first novels were organic, the latter are merely episodic. “Babbitt” is almost plotless. It is, at the same time, the picture of a man and that of a profession. Babbitt is not a fancy. He is the _homo americanus par excellence_, the representative average American. He recalls Molière’s “tradesman turned a gentleman.” He makes us think of M. Jourdain as an immigrant in America, parvenu, with a Packard and an up-to-date house full of the most modern appliances. How proud M. Jourdain would be to-day of his motor car, his telephone, his bathroom, his typewriter and his radio! But M. Jourdain was an exception in seventeenth-century France and George Babbitt, we are told--though this well may be pure calumny--is the rule in twentieth-century America. Like Carol Kennicott, Babbitt has a double personality.