Chapter: THE towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of
steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as
silver rods. They were neither citadels nor churches, but frankly and
beautifully office-buildings.

The mist took pity on the fretted structures of earlier generations: the
Post Office with its shingle-tortured mansard, the red brick minarets
of hulking old houses, factories with stingy and sooted windows, wooden
tenements colored like mud. The city was full of such grotesqueries, but
the clean towers were thrusting them from the business center, and
on the farther hills were shining new houses, homes--they seemed--for
laughter and tranquillity.

Over a concrete bridge fled a limousine of long sleek hood and noiseless
engine. These people in evening clothes were returning from an all-night
rehearsal of a Little Theater play, an artistic adventure considerably
illuminated by champagne. Below the bridge curved a railroad, a maze
of green and crimson lights. The New York Flyer boomed past, and twenty
lines of polished steel leaped into the glare.

In one of the skyscrapers the wires of the Associated Press were closing
down. The telegraph operators wearily raised their celluloid eye-shades
after a night of talking with Paris and Peking. Through the building
crawled the scrubwomen, yawning, their old shoes slapping. The dawn mist
spun away. Cues of men with lunch-boxes clumped toward the immensity of
new factories, sheets of glass and hollow tile, glittering shops where
five thousand men worked beneath one roof, pouring out the honest wares
that would be sold up the Euphrates and across the veldt. The whistles
rolled out in greeting a chorus cheerful as the April dawn; the song of
labor in a city built--it seemed--for giants.


II

There was nothing of the giant in the aspect of the man who was
beginning to awaken on the sleeping-porch of a Dutch Colonial house in
that residential district of Zenith known as Floral Heights.

His name was George F. Babbitt. He was forty-six years old now, in
April, 1920, and he made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes
nor poetry, but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more
than people could afford to pay.

His large head was pink, his brown hair thin and dry. His face was
babyish in slumber, despite his wrinkles and the red spectacle-dents on
the slopes of his nose. He was not fat but he was exceedingly well fed;
his cheeks were pads, and the unroughened hand which lay helpless upon
the khaki-colored blanket was slightly puffy. He seemed prosperous,
extremely married and unromantic; and altogether unromantic appeared
this sleeping-porch, which looked on one sizable elm, two respectable
grass-plots, a cement driveway, and a corrugated iron garage. Yet
Babbitt was again dreaming of the fairy child, a dream more romantic
than scarlet pagodas by a silver sea.

For years the fairy child had come to him. Where others saw but Georgie
Babbitt, she discerned gallant youth. She waited for him, in the
darkness beyond mysterious groves. When at last he could slip away from
the crowded house he darted to her. His wife, his clamoring friends,
sought to follow, but he escaped, the girl fleet beside him, and they
crouched together on a shadowy hillside. She was so slim, so white, so
eager! She cried that he was gay and valiant, that she would wait for
him, that they would sail--

Rumble and bang of the milk-truck.

Babbitt moaned; turned over; struggled back toward his dream. He could
see only her face now, beyond misty waters. The furnace-man slammed the
basement door. A dog barked in the next yard. As Babbitt sank blissfully
into a dim warm tide, the paper-carrier went by whistling, and the
rolled-up Advocate thumped the front door. Babbitt roused, his stomach
constricted with alarm. As he relaxed, he was pierced by the familiar
and irritating rattle of some one cranking a Ford: snap-ah-ah,
snap-ah-ah, snap-ah-ah. Himself a pious motorist, Babbitt cranked with
the unseen driver, with him waited through taut hours for the roar of
the starting engine, with him agonized as the roar ceased and again
began the infernal patient snap-ah-ah--a round, flat sound, a shivering
cold-morning sound, a sound infuriating and inescapable. Not till the
rising voice of the motor told him that the Ford was moving was he
released from the panting tension. He glanced once at his favorite tree,
elm twigs against the gold patina of sky, and fumbled for sleep as for a
drug. He who had been a boy very credulous of life was no longer greatly
interested in the possible and improbable adventures of each new day.

He escaped from reality till the alarm-clock rang, at seven-twenty.


III

It was the best of nationally advertised and quantitatively produced
alarm-clocks, with all modern attachments, including cathedral chime,
intermittent alarm, and a phosphorescent dial. Babbitt was proud
of being awakened by such a rich device. Socially it was almost as
creditable as buying expensive cord tires.

He sulkily admitted now that there was no more escape, but he lay and
detested the grind of the real-estate business, and disliked his family,
and disliked himself for disliking them. The evening before, he had
played poker at Vergil Gunch's till midnight, and after such holidays
he was irritable before breakfast. It may have been the tremendous
home-brewed beer of the prohibition-era and the cigars to which that
beer enticed him; it may have been resentment of return from this fine,
bold man-world to a restricted region of wives and stenographers, and of
suggestions not to smoke so much.

From the bedroom beside the sleeping-porch, his wife's detestably
cheerful "Time to get up, Georgie boy," and the itchy sound, the brisk
and scratchy sound, of combing hairs out of a stiff brush.

He grunted; he dragged his thick legs, in faded baby-blue pajamas, from
under the khaki blanket; he sat on the edge of the cot, running his
fingers through his wild hair, while his plump feet mechanically felt
for his slippers. He looked regretfully at the blanket--forever a
suggestion to him of freedom and heroism. He had bought it for a camping
trip which had never come off. It symbolized gorgeous loafing, gorgeous
cursing, virile flannel shirts.

He creaked to his feet, groaning at the waves of pain which passed
behind his eyeballs. Though he waited for their scorching recurrence, he
looked blurrily out at the yard. It delighted him, as always; it was
the neat yard of a successful business man of Zenith, that is, it was
perfection, and made him also perfect. He regarded the corrugated
iron garage. For the three-hundred-and-sixty-fifth time in a year he
reflected, "No class to that tin shack. Have to build me a frame garage.
But by golly it's the only thing on the place that isn't up-to-date!"
While he stared he thought of a community garage for his acreage
development, Glen Oriole. He stopped puffing and jiggling. His arms were
akimbo. His petulant, sleep-swollen face was set in harder lines. He
suddenly seemed capable, an official, a man to contrive, to direct, to
get things done.

On the vigor of his idea he was carried down the hard, clean,
unused-looking hall into the bathroom.

Though the house was not large it had, like all houses on Floral
Heights, an altogether royal bathroom of porcelain and glazed tile and
metal sleek as silver. The towel-rack was a rod of clear glass set in
nickel. The tub was long enough for a Prussian Guard, and above the
set bowl was a sensational exhibit of tooth-brush holder, shaving-brush
holder, soap-dish, sponge-dish, and medicine-cabinet, so glittering and
so ingenious that they resembled an electrical instrument-board. But the
Babbitt whose god was Modern Appliances was not pleased. The air of the
bathroom was thick with the smell of a heathen toothpaste. "Verona been
at it again! 'Stead of sticking to Lilidol, like I've re-peat-ed-ly
asked her, she's gone and gotten some confounded stinkum stuff that
makes you sick!"

The bath-mat was wrinkled and the floor was wet. (His daughter Verona
eccentrically took baths in the morning, now and then.) He slipped on
the mat, and slid against the tub. He said "Damn!" Furiously he snatched
up his tube of shaving-cream, furiously he lathered, with a belligerent
slapping of the unctuous brush, furiously he raked his plump cheeks
with a safety-razor. It pulled. The blade was dull. He said,
"Damn--oh--oh--damn it!"

He hunted through the medicine-cabinet for a packet of new razor-blades
(reflecting, as invariably, "Be cheaper to buy one of these dinguses and
strop your own blades,") and when he discovered the packet, behind the
round box of bicarbonate of soda, he thought ill of his wife for putting
it there and very well of himself for not saying "Damn." But he did say
it, immediately afterward, when with wet and soap-slippery fingers he
tried to remove the horrible little envelope and crisp clinging oiled
paper from the new blade. Then there was the problem, oft-pondered,
never solved, of what to do with the old blade, which might imperil
the fingers of his young. As usual, he tossed it on top of the
medicine-cabinet, with a mental note that some day he must remove the
fifty or sixty other blades that were also temporarily, piled up there.
He finished his shaving in a growing testiness increased by his spinning
headache and by the emptiness in his stomach. When he was done, his
round 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 wife's, Verona's, Ted's, Tinka's, 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, I'm the goat!--and then
I want one and--I'm the only person in the doggone house that's 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 needn't wash
out the towels. Oh, Georgie, you didn't 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 B.V.D.
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."

"That's so. Perhaps it does."

"It certainly could stand being pressed, all right."

"Yes, perhaps it wouldn't hurt it to be pressed."

"But gee, the coat doesn't need pressing. No sense in having the whole
darn suit pressed, when the coat doesn't need it."

"That's so."

"But the pants certainly need it, all right. Look at them--look at those
wrinkles--the pants certainly do need pressing."

"That's so. Oh, Georgie, why couldn't you wear the brown coat with the
blue trousers we were wondering what we'd 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 don't 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 B.V.D. undershirt, in
which he resembled a small boy humorlessly wearing a cheesecloth tabard
at a civic pageant. He never put on B.V.D.'s without thanking the God of
Progress that he didn't 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. Babbitt's 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 not babyish but weighty, and
you noted his heavy, blunt nose, his straight mouth and thick, long
upper lip, his chin overfleshy but strong; with respect you beheld him
put on the rest of his uniform as a Solid Citizen.

The gray suit was well cut, well made, and completely undistinguished.
It was a standard suit. White piping on the V of the vest added a flavor
of law and learning. His shoes were black laced boots, good boots,
honest boots, standard boots, extraordinarily uninteresting boots.
The only frivolity was in his purple knitted scarf. With considerable
comment on the matter to Mrs. Babbitt (who, acrobatically fastening the
back of her blouse to her skirt with a safety-pin, did not hear a word
he said), he chose between the purple scarf and a tapestry effect
with stringless brown harps among blown palms, and into it he thrust a
snake-head pin with opal eyes.

A sensational event was changing from the brown suit to the gray the
contents of his pockets. He was earnest about these objects. They were
of eternal importance, like baseball or the Republican Party. They
included a fountain pen and a silver pencil (always lacking a supply of
new leads) which belonged in the righthand upper vest pocket. Without
them he would have felt naked. On his watch-chain were a gold penknife,
silver cigar-cutter, seven keys (the use of two of which he had
forgotten), and incidentally a good watch. Depending from the chain was
a large, yellowish elk's-tooth-proclamation of his membership in the
Brotherly and Protective Order of Elks. Most significant of all was his
loose-leaf pocket note-book, that modern and efficient note-book
which contained the addresses of people whom he had forgotten, prudent
memoranda of postal money-orders which had reached their destinations
months ago, stamps which had lost their mucilage, clippings of verses by
T. Cholmondeley Frink and of the newspaper editorials from which Babbitt
got his opinions and his polysyllables, notes to be sure and do things
which he did not intend to do, and one curious inscription--D.S.S.
D.M.Y.P.D.F.

But he had no cigarette-case. No one had ever happened to give him
one, so he hadn't the habit, and people who carried cigarette-cases he
regarded as effeminate.

Last, he stuck in his lapel the Boosters' Club button. With the
conciseness of great art the button displayed two words: "Boosters-Pep!"
It made Babbitt feel loyal and important. It associated him with Good
Fellows, with men who were nice and human, and important in business
circles. It was his V.C., his Legion of Honor ribbon, his Phi Beta Kappa
key.

With the subtleties of dressing ran other complex worries. "I feel kind
of punk this morning," he said. "I think I had too much dinner last
evening. You oughtn't to serve those heavy banana fritters."

"But you asked me to have some."

"I know, but--I tell you, when a fellow gets past forty he has to look
after his digestion. There's a lot of fellows that don't take proper
care of themselves. I tell you at forty a man's a fool or his doctor--I
mean, his own doctor. Folks don't give enough attention to this matter
of dieting. Now I think--Course a man ought to have a good meal after
the day's work, but it would be a good thing for both of us if we took
lighter lunches."

"But Georgie, here at home I always do have a light lunch."

"Mean to imply I make a hog of myself, eating down-town? Yes, sure!
You'd have a swell time if you had to eat the truck that new steward
hands out to us at the Athletic Club! But I certainly do feel out of
sorts, this morning. Funny, got a pain down here on the left side--but
no, that wouldn't be appendicitis, would it? Last night, when I was
driving over to Verg Gunch's, I felt a pain in my stomach, too. Right
here it was--kind of a sharp shooting pain. I--Where'd that dime go to?
Why don't you serve more prunes at breakfast? Of course I eat an apple
every evening--an apple a day keeps the doctor away--but still, you
ought to have more prunes, and not all these fancy doodads."

"The last time I had prunes you didn't eat them."

"Well, I didn't feel like eating 'em, I suppose. Matter of fact, I think
I did eat some of 'em. Anyway--I tell you it's mighty important to--I
was saying to Verg Gunch, just last evening, most people don't take
sufficient care of their diges--"

"Shall we have the Gunches for our dinner, next week?"

"Why sure; you bet."

"Now see here, George: I want you to put on your nice dinner-jacket that
evening."

"Rats! The rest of 'em won't want to dress."

"Of course they will. You remember when you didn't dress for the
Littlefields' supper-party, and all the rest did, and how embarrassed
you were."

"Embarrassed, hell! I wasn't embarrassed. Everybody knows I can put
on as expensive a Tux. as anybody else, and I should worry if I don't
happen to have it on sometimes. All a darn nuisance, anyway. All right
for a woman, that stays around the house all the time, but when a
fellow's worked like the dickens all day, he doesn't want to go and
hustle his head off getting into the soup-and-fish for a lot of folks
that he's seen in just reg'lar ordinary clothes that same day."

"You know you enjoy being seen in one. The other evening you admitted
you were glad I'd insisted on your dressing. You said you felt a lot
better for it. And oh, Georgie, I do wish you wouldn't say 'Tux.' It's
'dinner-jacket.'"

"Rats, what's the odds?"

"Well, it's what all the nice folks say. Suppose Lucile McKelvey heard
you calling it a 'Tux.'"

"Well, that's all right now! Lucile McKelvey can't pull anything on
me! Her folks are common as mud, even if her husband and her dad are
millionaires! I suppose you're trying to rub in your exalted social
position! Well, let me tell you that your revered paternal ancestor,
Henry T., doesn't even call it a 'Tux.'! He calls it a 'bobtail jacket
for a ringtail monkey,' and you couldn't get him into one unless you
chloroformed him!"

"Now don't be horrid, George."

"Well, I don't want to be horrid, but Lord! you're getting as fussy as
Verona. Ever since she got out of college she's been too rambunctious
to live with--doesn't know what she wants--well, I know what she
wants!--all she wants is to marry a millionaire, and live in Europe,
and hold some preacher's hand, and simultaneously at the same time stay
right here in Zenith and be some blooming kind of a socialist agitator
or boss charity-worker or some damn thing! Lord, and Ted is just as bad!
He wants to go to college, and he doesn't want to go to college.
Only one of the three that knows her own mind is Tinka. Simply can't
understand how I ever came to have a pair of shillyshallying children
like Rone and Ted. I may not be any Rockefeller or James J. Shakespeare,
but I certainly do know my own mind, and I do keep right on plugging
along in the office and--Do you know the latest? Far as I can figure
out, Ted's new bee is he'd like to be a movie actor and--And here I've
told him a hundred times, if he'll go to college and law-school and
make good, I'll set him up in business and--Verona just exactly as bad.
Doesn't know what she wants. Well, well, come on! Aren't you ready yet?
The girl rang the bell three minutes ago."


V

Before he followed his wife, Babbitt stood at the westernmost window of
their room. This residential settlement, Floral Heights, was on a rise;
and though the center of the city was three miles away--Zenith had
between three and four hundred thousand inhabitants now--he could see
the top of the Second National Tower, an Indiana limestone building of
thirty-five stories.

Its shining walls rose against April sky to a simple cornice like a
streak of white fire. Integrity was in the tower, and decision. It
bore its strength lightly as a tall soldier. As Babbitt stared,
the nervousness was soothed from his face, his slack chin lifted in
reverence. All he articulated was "That's one lovely sight!" but he was
inspired by the rhythm of the city; his love of it renewed. He beheld
the tower as a temple-spire of the religion of business, a faith
passionate, exalted, surpassing common men; and as he clumped down to
breakfast he whistled the ballad "Oh, by gee, by gosh, by jingo" as
though it were a hymn melancholy and noble.





RELIEVED of Babbitt's bumbling and the soft grunts with which his wife
expressed the sympathy she was too experienced to feel and much
too experienced not to show, their bedroom settled instantly into
impersonality.

It gave on the sleeping-porch. It served both of them as dressing-room,
and on the coldest nights Babbitt luxuriously gave up the duty of being
manly and retreated to the bed inside, to curl his toes in the warmth
and laugh at the January gale.

The room displayed a modest and pleasant color-scheme, after one of the
best standard designs of the decorator who "did the interiors" for most
of the speculative-builders' houses in Zenith. The walls were gray, the
woodwork white, the rug a serene blue; and very much like mahogany was
the furniture--the bureau with its great clear mirror, Mrs. Babbitt's
dressing-table with toilet-articles of almost solid silver, the plain
twin beds, between them a small table holding a standard electric
bedside lamp, a glass for water, and a standard bedside book
with colored illustrations--what particular book it was cannot be
ascertained, since no one had ever opened it. The mattresses were firm
but not hard, triumphant modern mattresses which had cost a great deal
of money; the hot-water radiator was of exactly the proper scientific
surface for the cubic contents of the room. The windows were large
and easily opened, with the best catches and cords, and Holland
roller-shades guaranteed not to crack. It was a masterpiece among
bedrooms, right out of Cheerful Modern Houses for Medium Incomes. Only
it had nothing to do with the Babbitts, nor with any one else. If people
had ever lived and loved here, read thrillers at midnight and lain in
beautiful indolence on a Sunday morning, there were no signs of it. It
had the air of being a very good room in a very good hotel. One expected
the chambermaid to come in and make it ready for people who would stay
but one night, go without looking back, and never think of it again.

Every second house in Floral Heights had a bedroom precisely like this.

The Babbitts' house was five years old. It was all as competent
and glossy as this bedroom. It had the best of taste, the best of
inexpensive rugs, a simple and laudable architecture, and the latest
conveniences. Throughout, electricity took the place of candles and
slatternly hearth-fires. Along the bedroom baseboard were three plugs
for electric lamps, concealed by little brass doors. In the halls were
plugs for the vacuum cleaner, and in the living-room plugs for the piano
lamp, for the electric fan. The trim dining-room (with its admirable oak
buffet, its leaded-glass cupboard, its creamy plaster walls, its modest
scene of a salmon expiring upon a pile of oysters) had plugs which
supplied the electric percolator and the electric toaster.

In fact there was but one thing wrong with the Babbitt house: It was not
a home.


II

Often of a morning Babbitt came bouncing and jesting in to breakfast.
But things were mysteriously awry to-day. As he pontifically tread the
upper hall he looked into Verona's bedroom and protested, "What's the
use of giving the family a high-class house when they don't appreciate
it and tend to business and get down to brass tacks?"

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 talkfests 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--"

"Now you look here! The first thing you got to understand is that all
this uplift and flipflop and settlement-work and recreation is nothing
in God's world but the entering wedge for socialism. The sooner a man
learns he isn't going to be coddled, and he needn't expect a lot of free
grub and, uh, all these free classes and flipflop and doodads for his
kids unless he earns 'em, why, the sooner he'll get on the job and
produce--produce--produce! That's what the country needs, and not all
this fancy stuff that just enfeebles the will-power of the working man
and gives his kids a lot of notions above their class. And you--if you'd
tend to business instead of fooling and fussing--All the time! When I
was a young man I made up my mind what I wanted to do, and stuck to it
through thick and thin, and that's why I'm where I am to-day, and--Myra!
What do you let the girl chop the toast up into these dinky little
chunks for? Can't get your fist onto 'em. Half cold, anyway!"

Ted Babbitt, junior in the great East Side High School, had been making
hiccup-like sounds of interruption. He blurted now, "Say, Rone, you
going to--"

Verona whirled. "Ted! Will you kindly not interrupt us when we're
talking about serious matters!"

"Aw punk," said Ted judicially. "Ever since somebody slipped up and let
you out of college, Ammonia, you been pulling these nut conversations
about what-nots and so-on-and-so-forths. Are you going to--I want to use
the car tonight."

Babbitt snorted, "Oh, you do! May want it myself!" Verona protested,
"Oh, you do, Mr. Smarty! I'm going to take it myself!" Tinka wailed,
"Oh, papa, you said maybe you'd drive us down to Rosedale!" and Mrs.
Babbitt, "Careful, Tinka, your sleeve is in the butter." They glared,
and Verona hurled, "Ted, you're a perfect pig about the car!"

"Course you're not! Not a-tall!" Ted could be maddeningly bland. "You
just want to grab it off, right after dinner, and leave it in front of
some skirt's house all evening while you sit and gas about lite'ature
and the highbrows you're going to marry--if they only propose!"

"Well, Dad oughtn't to EVER let you have it! You and those beastly Jones
boys drive like maniacs. The idea of your taking the turn on Chautauqua
Place at forty miles an hour!"

"Aw, where do you get that stuff! You're so darn scared of the car that
you drive up-hill with the emergency brake on!"

"I do not! And you--Always talking about how much you know about motors,
and Eunice Littlefield told me you said the battery fed the generator!"

"You--why, my good woman, you don't know a generator from a
differential." Not unreasonably was Ted lofty with her. He was a natural
mechanic, a maker and tinkerer of machines; he lisped in blueprints for
the blueprints came.

"That'll do now!" Babbitt flung in mechanically, as he lighted the
gloriously satisfying first cigar of the day and tasted the exhilarating
drug of the Advocate-Times headlines.

Ted negotiated: "Gee, honest, Rone, I don't want to take the old boat,
but I promised couple o' girls in my class I'd drive 'em down to
the rehearsal of the school chorus, and, gee, I don't want to, but a
gentleman's got to keep his social engagements."

"Well, upon my word! You and your social engagements! In high school!"

"Oh, ain't we select since we went to that hen college! Let me tell you
there isn't a private school in the state that's got as swell a bunch as
we got in Gamma Digamma this year. There's two fellows that their dads
are millionaires. Say, gee, I ought to have a car of my own, like lots
of the fellows." Babbitt almost rose. "A car of your own! Don't you want
a yacht, and a house and lot? That pretty nearly takes the cake! A boy
that can't pass his Latin examinations, like any other boy ought to, and
he expects me to give him a motor-car, and I suppose a chauffeur, and an
areoplane maybe, as a reward for the hard work he puts in going to the
movies with Eunice Littlefield! Well, when you see me giving you--"

Somewhat later, after diplomacies, Ted persuaded Verona to admit that
she was merely going to the Armory, that evening, to see the dog and
cat show. She was then, Ted planned, to park the car in front of the
candy-store across from the Armory and he would pick it up. There were
masterly arrangements regarding leaving the key, and having the gasoline
tank filled; and passionately, devotees of the Great God Motor, they
hymned the patch on the spare inner-tube, and the lost jack-handle.


Their truce dissolving, Ted observed that her friends were "a scream of
a bunch-stuck-up gabby four-flushers." His friends, she indicated,
were "disgusting imitation sports, and horrid little shrieking ignorant
girls." Further: "It's disgusting of you to smoke cigarettes, and so on
and so forth, and those clothes you've got on this morning, they're too
utterly ridiculous--honestly, simply disgusting."

Ted balanced over to the low beveled mirror in the buffet, regarded his
charms, and smirked. His suit, the latest thing in Old Eli Togs, was
skin-tight, with skimpy trousers to the tops of his glaring tan boots, a
chorus-man waistline, pattern of an agitated check, and across the back
a belt which belted nothing. His scarf was an enormous black silk wad.
His flaxen hair was ice-smooth, pasted back without parting. When he
went to school he would add a cap with a long vizor like a shovel-blade.
Proudest of all was his waistcoat, saved for, begged for, plotted for;
a real Fancy Vest of fawn with polka dots of a decayed red, the points
astoundingly long. On the lower edge of it he wore a high-school button,
a class button, and a fraternity pin.

And none of it mattered. He was supple and swift and flushed; his eyes
(which he believed to be cynical) were candidly eager. But he was not
over-gentle. He waved his hand at poor dumpy Verona and drawled: "Yes, I
guess we're pretty ridiculous and disgusticulus, and I rather guess our
new necktie is some smear!"

Babbitt barked: "It is! And while you're admiring yourself, let me tell
you it might add to your manly beauty if you wiped some of that egg off
your mouth!"

Verona giggled, momentary victor in the greatest of Great Wars, which
is the family war. Ted looked at her hopelessly, then shrieked at Tinka:
"For the love o' Pete, quit pouring the whole sugar bowl on your corn
flakes!"

When Verona and Ted were gone and Tinka upstairs, Babbitt groaned to his
wife: "Nice family, I must say! I don't pretend to be any baa-lamb, and
maybe I'm a little cross-grained at breakfast sometimes, but the way
they go on jab-jab-jabbering, I simply can't stand it. I swear, I feel
like going off some place where I can get a little peace. I do think
after a man's spent his lifetime trying to give his kids a chance and
a decent education, it's pretty discouraging to hear them all the time
scrapping like a bunch of hyenas and never--and never--Curious; here
in the paper it says--Never silent for one mom--Seen the morning paper
yet?"

"No, dear." In twenty-three years of married life, Mrs. Babbitt had seen
the paper before her husband just sixty-seven times.

"Lots of news. Terrible big tornado in the South. Hard luck, all right.
But this, say, this is corking! Beginning of the end for those fellows!
New York Assembly has passed some bills that ought to completely outlaw
the socialists! And there's an elevator-runners' strike in New York and
a lot of college boys are taking their places. That's the stuff! And
a mass-meeting in Birmingham's demanded that this Mick agitator, this
fellow De Valera, be deported. Dead right, by golly! All these agitators
paid with German gold anyway. And we got no business interfering with
the Irish or any other foreign government. Keep our hands strictly off.
And there's another well-authenticated rumor from Russia that Lenin is
dead. That's fine. It's beyond me why we don't just step in there and
kick those Bolshevik cusses out."

"That's so," said Mrs. Babbitt.

"And it says here a fellow was inaugurated mayor in overalls--a
preacher, too! What do you think of that!"

"Humph! Well!"

He searched for an attitude, but neither as a Republican, a
Presbyterian, an Elk, nor a real-estate broker did he have any doctrine
about preacher-mayors laid down for him, so he grunted and went on. She
looked sympathetic and did not hear a word. Later she would read the
headlines, the society columns, and the department-store advertisements.

"What do you know about this! Charley McKelvey still doing the sassiety
stunt as heavy as ever. Here's what that gushy woman reporter says about
last night:"


Never is Society with the big, big S more flattered than when they are
bidden to partake of good cheer at the distinguished and hospitable
residence of Mr. and Mrs. Charles L. McKelvey as they were last night.
Set in its spacious lawns and landscaping, one of the notable sights
crowning Royal Ridge, but merry and homelike despite its mighty stone
walls and its vast rooms famed for their decoration, their home was
thrown open last night for a dance in honor of Mrs. McKelvey's notable
guest, Miss J. Sneeth of Washington. The wide hall is so generous in
its proportions that it made a perfect ballroom, its hardwood floor
reflecting the charming pageant above its polished surface. Even
the delights of dancing paled before the alluring opportunities for
tete-a-tetes that invited the soul to loaf in the long library before
the baronial fireplace, or in the drawing-room with its deep comfy
armchairs, its shaded lamps just made for a sly whisper of pretty
nothings all a deux; or even in the billiard room where one could take
a cue and show a prowess at still another game than that sponsored by
Cupid and Terpsichore.


There was more, a great deal more, in the best urban journalistic
style of Miss Elnora Pearl Bates, the popular society editor of the
Advocate-Times. But Babbitt could not abide it. He grunted. He wrinkled
the newspaper. He protested: "Can you beat it! I'm willing to hand a lot
of credit to Charley McKelvey. When we were in college together, he was
just as hard up as any of us, and he's made a million good bucks out
of contracting and hasn't been any dishonester or bought any more city
councils than was necessary. And that's a good house of his--though it
ain't any 'mighty stone walls' and it ain't worth the ninety thousand
it cost him. But when it comes to talking as though Charley McKelvey
and all that booze-hoisting set of his are any blooming bunch of of, of
Vanderbilts, why, it makes me tired!"

Timidly from Mrs. Babbitt: "I would like to see the inside of their
house though. It must be lovely. I've never been inside."

"Well, I have! Lots of--couple of times. To see Chaz about business
deals, in the evening. It's not so much. I wouldn't WANT to go there to
dinner with that gang of, of high-binders. And I'll bet I make a whole
lot more money than some of those tin-horns that spend all they got on
dress-suits and haven't got a decent suit of underwear to their name!
Hey! What do you think of this!"

Mrs. Babbitt was strangely unmoved by the tidings from the Real Estate
and Building column of the Advocate-Times:

     Ashtabula Street, 496--J. K. Dawson to
     Thomas Mullally, April 17, 15.7 X 112.2,
     mtg. $4000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nom

And this morning Babbitt was too disquieted to entertain her with items
from Mechanics' Liens, Mortgages Recorded, and Contracts Awarded. He
rose. As he looked at her his eyebrows seemed shaggier than usual.
Suddenly:

"Yes, maybe--Kind of shame to not keep in touch with folks like the
McKelveys. We might try inviting them to dinner, some evening. Oh,
thunder, let's not waste our good time thinking about 'em! Our little
bunch has a lot liver times than all those plutes. Just compare a real
human like you with these neurotic birds like Lucile McKelvey--all
highbrow talk and dressed up like a plush horse! You're a great old
girl, hon.!"

He covered his betrayal of softness with a complaining: "Say, don't let
Tinka go and eat any more of that poison nutfudge. For Heaven's sake,
try to keep her from ruining her digestion. I tell you, most folks don't
appreciate how important it is to have a good digestion and regular
habits. Be back 'bout usual time, I guess."

He kissed her--he didn't quite kiss her--he laid unmoving lips against
her unflushing cheek. He hurried out to the garage, muttering: "Lord,
what a family! And now Myra is going to get pathetic on me because we
don't train with this millionaire outfit. Oh, Lord, sometimes I'd like
to quit the whole game. And the office worry and detail just as bad. And
I act cranky and--I don't mean to, but I get--So darn tired!"





To George F. Babbitt, as to most prosperous citizens of Zenith, his
motor car was poetry and tragedy, love and heroism. The office was his
pirate ship but the car his perilous excursion ashore.

Among the tremendous crises of each day none was more dramatic than
starting the engine. It was slow on cold mornings; there was the long,
anxious whirr of the starter; and sometimes he had to drip ether into
the cocks of the cylinders, which was so very interesting that at lunch
he would chronicle it drop by drop, and orally calculate how much each
drop had cost him.

This morning he was darkly prepared to find something wrong, and he felt
belittled when the mixture exploded sweet and strong, and the car didn't
even brush the door-jamb, gouged and splintery with many bruisings by
fenders, as he backed out of the garage. He was confused. He shouted
"Morning!" to Sam Doppelbrau with more cordiality than he had intended.

Babbitt's green and white Dutch Colonial house was one of three in that
block on Chatham Road. To the left of it was the residence of Mr. Samuel
Doppelbrau, secretary of an excellent firm of bathroom-fixture jobbers.
His was a comfortable house with no architectural manners whatever; a
large wooden box with a squat tower, a broad porch, and glossy paint
yellow as a yolk. Babbitt disapproved of Mr. and Mrs. Doppelbrau as
"Bohemian." From their house came midnight music and obscene laughter;
there were neighborhood rumors of bootlegged whisky and fast motor
rides. They furnished Babbitt with many happy evenings of discussion,
during which he announced firmly, "I'm not strait-laced, and I don't
mind seeing a fellow throw in a drink once in a while, but when it comes
to deliberately trying to get away with a lot of hell-raising all the
while like the Doppelbraus do, it's too rich for my blood!"

On the other side of Babbitt lived Howard Littlefield, Ph.D., in a
strictly modern house whereof the lower part was dark red tapestry
brick, with a leaded oriel, the upper part of pale stucco like spattered
clay, and the roof red-tiled. Littlefield was the Great Scholar of the
neighborhood; the authority on everything in the world except babies,
cooking, and motors. He was a Bachelor of Arts of Blodgett College,
and a Doctor of Philosophy in economics of Yale. He was the
employment-manager and publicity-counsel of the Zenith Street Traction
Company. He could, on ten hours' notice, appear before the board of
aldermen or the state legislature and prove, absolutely, with figures
all in rows and with precedents from Poland and New Zealand, that the
street-car company loved the Public and yearned over its employees;
that all its stock was owned by Widows and Orphans; and that whatever it
desired to do would benefit property-owners by increasing rental values,
and help the poor by lowering rents. All his acquaintances turned
to Littlefield when they desired to know the date of the battle of
Saragossa, the definition of the word "sabotage," the future of the
German mark, the translation of "hinc illae lachrimae," or the number of
products of coal tar. He awed Babbitt by confessing that he often sat up
till midnight reading the figures and footnotes in Government reports,
or skimming (with amusement at the author's mistakes) the latest volumes
of chemistry, archeology, and ichthyology.

But Littlefield's great value was as a spiritual example. Despite
his strange learnings he was as strict a Presbyterian and as firm a
Republican as George F. Babbitt. He confirmed the business men in the
faith. Where they knew only by passionate instinct that their system of
industry and manners was perfect, Dr. Howard Littlefield proved it
to them, out of history, economics, and the confessions of reformed
radicals.

Babbitt had a good deal of honest pride in being the neighbor of such a
savant, and in Ted's intimacy with Eunice Littlefield. At sixteen
Eunice was interested in no statistics save those regarding the ages
and salaries of motion-picture stars, but--as Babbitt definitively put
it--"she was her father's daughter."

The difference between a light man like Sam Doppelbrau and a really fine
character like Littlefield was revealed in their appearances. Doppelbrau
was disturbingly young for a man of forty-eight. He wore his derby on
the back of his head, and his red face was wrinkled with meaningless
laughter. But Littlefield was old for a man of forty-two. He was tall,
broad, thick; his gold-rimmed spectacles were engulfed in the folds of
his long face; his hair was a tossed mass of greasy blackness; he puffed
and rumbled as he talked; his Phi Beta Kappa key shone against a spotty
black vest; he smelled of old pipes; he was altogether funereal
and archidiaconal; and to real-estate brokerage and the jobbing of
bathroom-fixtures he added an aroma of sanctity.

This morning he was in front of his house, inspecting the grass parking
between the curb and the broad cement sidewalk. Babbitt stopped his car
and leaned out to shout "Mornin'!" Littlefield lumbered over and stood
with one foot up on the running-board.

"Fine morning," said Babbitt, lighting--illegally early--his second
cigar of the day.

"Yes, it's a mighty fine morning," said Littlefield.

"Spring coming along fast now."

"Yes, it's real spring now, all right," said Littlefield.

"Still cold nights, though. Had to have a couple blankets, on the
sleeping-porch last night."

"Yes, it wasn't any too warm last night," said Littlefield.

"But I don't anticipate we'll have any more real cold weather now."

"No, but still, there was snow at Tiflis, Montana, yesterday," said the
Scholar, "and you remember the blizzard they had out West three days
ago--thirty inches of snow at Greeley, Colorado--and two years ago we
had a snow-squall right here in Zenith on the twenty-fifth of April."

"Is that a fact! Say, old man, what do you think about the Republican
candidate? Who'll they nominate for president? Don't you think it's
about time we had a real business administration?"

"In my opinion, what the country needs, first and foremost, is a good,
sound, business-like conduct of its affairs. What we need is--a business
administration!" said Littlefield.

"I'm glad to hear you say that! I certainly am glad to hear you say
that! I didn't know how you'd feel about it, with all your associations
with colleges and so on, and I'm glad you feel that way. What the
country needs--just at this present juncture--is neither a college
president nor a lot of monkeying with foreign affairs, but a good--sound
economical--business--administration, that will give us a chance to have
something like a decent turnover."

"Yes. It isn't generally realized that even in China the schoolmen are
giving way to more practical men, and of course you can see what that
implies."

"Is that a fact! Well, well!" breathed Babbitt, feeling much calmer, and
much happier about the way things were going in the world. "Well, it's
been nice to stop and parleyvoo a second. Guess I'll have to get down to
the office now and sting a few clients. Well, so long, old man. See you
tonight. So long."


II

They had labored, these solid citizens. Twenty years before, the hill
on which Floral Heights was spread, with its bright roofs and immaculate
turf and amazing comfort, had been a wilderness of rank second-growth
elms and oaks and maples. Along the precise streets were still a few
wooded vacant lots, and the fragment of an old orchard. It was brilliant
to-day; the apple boughs were lit with fresh leaves like torches of
green fire. The first white of cherry blossoms flickered down a gully,
and robins clamored.

Babbitt sniffed the earth, chuckled at the hysteric robins as he would
have chuckled at kittens or at a comic movie. He was, to the eye, the
perfect office-going executive--a well-fed man in a correct brown soft
hat and frameless spectacles, smoking a large cigar, driving a good
motor along a semi-suburban parkway. But in him was some genius of
authentic love for his neighborhood, his city, his clan. The winter was
over; the time was come for the building, the visible growth, which to
him was glory. He lost his dawn depression; he was ruddily cheerful when
he stopped on Smith Street to leave the brown trousers, and to have the
gasoline-tank filled.

The familiarity of the rite fortified him: the sight of the tall red
iron gasoline-pump, the hollow-tile and terra-cotta garage, the window
full of the most agreeable accessories--shiny casings, spark-plugs with
immaculate porcelain jackets tire-chains of gold and silver. He was
flattered by the friendliness with which Sylvester Moon, dirtiest and
most skilled of motor mechanics, came out to serve him. "Mornin', Mr.
Babbitt!" said Moon, and Babbitt felt himself a person of importance,
one whose name even busy garagemen remembered--not one of these
cheap-sports flying around in flivvers. He admired the ingenuity of the
automatic dial, clicking off gallon by gallon; admired the smartness
of the sign: "A fill in time saves getting stuck--gas to-day 31 cents";
admired the rhythmic gurgle of the gasoline as it flowed into the tank,
and the mechanical regularity with which Moon turned the handle.

"How much we takin' to-day?" asked Moon, in a manner which combined the
independence of the great specialist, the friendliness of a familiar
gossip, and respect for a man of weight in the community, like George F.
Babbitt.

"Fill 'er up."

"Who you rootin' for for Republican candidate, Mr. Babbitt?"

"It's too early to make any predictions yet. After all, there's still
a good month and two weeks--no, three weeks--must be almost three
weeks--well, there's more than six weeks in all before the Republican
convention, and I feel a fellow ought to keep an open mind and give
all the candidates a show--look 'em all over and size 'em up, and then
decide carefully."

"That's a fact, Mr. Babbitt."

"But I'll tell you--and my stand on this is just the same as it was four
years ago, and eight years ago, and it'll be my stand four years from
now--yes, and eight years from now! What I tell everybody, and it can't
be too generally understood, is that what we need first, last, and all
the time is a good, sound business administration!"

"By golly, that's right!"

"How do those front tires look to you?"

"Fine! Fine! Wouldn't be much work for garages if everybody looked after
their car the way you do."

"Well, I do try and have some sense about it." Babbitt paid his bill,
said adequately, "Oh, keep the change," and drove off in an ecstasy of
honest self-appreciation. It was with the manner of a Good Samaritan
that he shouted at a respectable-looking man who was waiting for a
trolley car, "Have a lift?" As the man climbed in Babbitt condescended,
"Going clear down-town? Whenever I see a fellow waiting for a trolley,
I always make it a practice to give him a lift--unless, of course, he
looks like a bum."

"Wish there were more folks that were so generous with their machines,"
dutifully said the victim of benevolence. "Oh, no, 'tain't a question of
generosity, hardly. Fact, I always feel--I was saying to my son just the
other night--it's a fellow's duty to share the good things of this world
with his neighbors, and it gets my goat when a fellow gets stuck
on himself and goes around tooting his horn merely because he's
charitable."

The victim seemed unable to find the right answer. Babbitt boomed on:

"Pretty punk service the Company giving us on these car-lines. Nonsense
to only run the Portland Road cars once every seven minutes. Fellow gets
mighty cold on a winter morning, waiting on a street corner with the
wind nipping at his ankles."

"That's right. The Street Car Company don't care a damn what kind of a
deal they give us. Something ought to happen to 'em."

Babbitt was alarmed. "But still, of course it won't do to just keep
knocking the Traction Company and not realize the difficulties they're
operating under, like these cranks that want municipal ownership. The
way these workmen hold up the Company for high wages is simply a
crime, and of course the burden falls on you and me that have to pay
a seven-cent fare! Fact, there's remarkable service on all their
lines--considering."

"Well--" uneasily.

"Darn fine morning," Babbitt explained. "Spring coming along fast."

"Yes, it's real spring now."

The victim had no originality, no wit, and Babbitt fell into a great
silence and devoted himself to the game of beating trolley cars to the
corner: a spurt, a tail-chase, nervous speeding between the huge yellow
side of the trolley and the jagged row of parked motors, shooting past
just as the trolley stopped--a rare game and valiant.

And all the while he was conscious of the loveliness of Zenith. For
weeks together he noticed nothing but clients and the vexing To Rent
signs of rival brokers. To-day, in mysterious malaise, he raged or
rejoiced with equal nervous swiftness, and to-day the light of spring
was so winsome that he lifted his head and saw.

He admired each district along his familiar route to the office: The
bungalows and shrubs and winding irregular drive ways of Floral Heights.
The one-story shops on Smith Street, a glare of plate-glass and new
yellow brick; groceries and laundries and drug-stores to supply the more
immediate needs of East Side housewives. The market gardens in Dutch
Hollow, their shanties patched with corrugated iron and stolen doors.
Billboards with crimson goddesses nine feet tall advertising cinema
films, pipe tobacco, and talcum powder. The old "mansions" along Ninth
Street, S. E., like aged dandies in filthy linen; wooden castles turned
into boarding-houses, with muddy walks and rusty hedges, jostled
by fast-intruding garages, cheap apartment-houses, and fruit-stands
conducted by bland, sleek Athenians. Across the belt of railroad-tracks,
factories with high-perched water-tanks and tall stacks-factories
producing condensed milk, paper boxes, lighting-fixtures, motor cars.
Then the business center, the thickening darting traffic, the crammed
trolleys unloading, and high doorways of marble and polished granite.

It was big--and Babbitt respected bigness in anything; in mountains,
jewels, muscles, wealth, or words. He was, for a spring-enchanted
moment, the lyric and almost unselfish lover of Zenith. He thought of
the outlying factory suburbs; of the Chaloosa River with its strangely
eroded banks; of the orchard-dappled Tonawanda Hills to the North,
and all the fat dairy land and big barns and comfortable herds. As he
dropped his passenger he cried, "Gosh, I feel pretty good this morning!"
III

Epochal as starting the car was the drama of parking it before he
entered his office. As he turned from Oberlin Avenue round the corner
into Third Street, N.E., he peered ahead for a space in the line of
parked cars. He angrily just missed a space as a rival driver slid into
it. Ahead, another car was leaving the curb, and Babbitt slowed up,
holding out his hand to the cars pressing on him from behind, agitatedly
motioning an old woman to go ahead, avoiding a truck which bore down on
him from one side. With front wheels nicking the wrought-steel bumper
of the car in front, he stopped, feverishly cramped his steering-wheel,
slid back into the vacant space and, with eighteen inches of room,
manoeuvered to bring the car level with the curb. It was a virile
adventure masterfully executed. With satisfaction he locked a
thief-proof steel wedge on the front wheel, and crossed the street to
his real-estate office on the ground floor of the Reeves Building.

The Reeves Building was as fireproof as a rock and as efficient as
a typewriter; fourteen stories of yellow pressed brick, with clean,
upright, unornamented lines. It was filled with the offices of lawyers,
doctors, agents for machinery, for emery wheels, for wire fencing, for
mining-stock. Their gold signs shone on the windows. The entrance was
too modern to be flamboyant with pillars; it was quiet, shrewd, neat.
Along the Third Street side were a Western Union Telegraph Office,
the Blue Delft Candy Shop, Shotwell's Stationery Shop, and the
Babbitt-Thompson Realty Company.

Babbitt could have entered his office from the street, as customers
did, but it made him feel an insider to go through the corridor of
the building and enter by the back door. Thus he was greeted by the
villagers.

The little unknown people who inhabited the Reeves Building
corridors--elevator-runners, starter, engineers, superintendent, and the
doubtful-looking lame man who conducted the news and cigar stand--were
in no way city-dwellers. They were rustics, living in a constricted
valley, interested only in one another and in The Building. Their
Main Street was the entrance hall, with its stone floor, severe marble
ceiling, and the inner windows of the shops. The liveliest place on the
street was the Reeves Building Barber Shop, but this was also Babbitt's
one embarrassment. Himself, he patronized the glittering Pompeian
Barber Shop in the Hotel Thornleigh, and every time he passed the
Reeves shop--ten times a day, a hundred times--he felt untrue to his own
village.

Now, as one of the squirearchy, greeted with honorable salutations by
the villagers, he marched into his office, and peace and dignity were
upon him, and the morning's dissonances all unheard.

They were heard again, immediately.

Stanley Graff, the outside salesman, was talking on the telephone with
tragic lack of that firm manner which disciplines clients: "Say, uh, I
think I got just the house that would suit you--the Percival House, in
Linton.... Oh, you've seen it. Well, how'd it strike you?... Huh?
...Oh," irresolutely, "oh, I see."

As Babbitt marched into his private room, a coop with semi-partition of
oak and frosted glass, at the back of the office, he reflected how hard
it was to find employees who had his own faith that he was going to make
sales.

There were nine members of the staff, besides Babbitt and his partner
and father-in-law, Henry Thompson, who rarely came to the office. The
nine were Stanley Graff, the outside salesman--a youngish man given to
cigarettes and the playing of pool; old Mat Penniman, general utility
man, collector of rents and salesman of insurance--broken, silent, gray;
a mystery, reputed to have been a "crack" real-estate man with a firm
of his own in haughty Brooklyn; Chester Kirby Laylock, resident salesman
out at the Glen Oriole acreage development--an enthusiastic person with
a silky mustache and much family; Miss Theresa McGoun, the swift and
rather pretty stenographer; Miss Wilberta Bannigan, the thick, slow,
laborious accountant and file-clerk; and four freelance part-time
commission salesmen.

As he looked from his own cage into the main room Babbitt mourned,
"McGoun's a good stenog., smart's a whip, but Stan Graff and all those
bums--" The zest of the spring morning was smothered in the stale office
air.

Normally he admired the office, with a pleased surprise that he should
have created this sure lovely thing; normally he was stimulated by
the clean newness of it and the air of bustle; but to-day it seemed
flat--the tiled floor, like a bathroom, the ocher-colored metal ceiling,
the faded maps on the hard plaster walls, the chairs of varnished pale
oak, the desks and filing-cabinets of steel painted in olive drab. It
was a vault, a steel chapel where loafing and laughter were raw sin.

He hadn't even any satisfaction in the new water-cooler! And it was the
very best of water-coolers, up-to-date, scientific, and right-thinking.
It had cost a great deal of money (in itself a virtue). It possessed a
non-conducting fiber ice-container, a porcelain water-jar (guaranteed
hygienic), a drip-less non-clogging sanitary faucet, and machine-painted
decorations in two tones of gold. He looked down the relentless stretch
of tiled floor at the water-cooler, and assured himself that no tenant
of the Reeves Building had a more expensive one, but he could not
recapture the feeling of social superiority it had given him. He
astoundingly grunted, "I'd like to beat it off to the woods right now.
And loaf all day. And go to Gunch's again to-night, and play poker,
and cuss as much as I feel like, and drink a hundred and nine-thousand
bottles of beer."

He sighed; he read through his mail; he shouted "Msgoun," which meant
"Miss McGoun"; and began to dictate.

This was his own version of his first letter:

"Omar Gribble, send it to his office, Miss McGoun, yours of twentieth to
hand and in reply would say look here, Gribble, I'm awfully afraid if
we go on shilly-shallying like this we'll just naturally lose the Allen
sale, I had Allen up on carpet day before yesterday and got right down
to cases and think I can assure you--uh, uh, no, change that: all my
experience indicates he is all right, means to do business, looked into
his financial record which is fine--that sentence seems to be a little
balled up, Miss McGoun; make a couple sentences out of it if you have
to, period, new paragraph.

"He is perfectly willing to pro rate the special assessment and strikes
me, am dead sure there will be no difficulty in getting him to pay for
title insurance, so now for heaven's sake let's get busy--no, make that:
so now let's go to it and get down--no, that's enough--you can tie
those sentences up a little better when you type 'em, Miss McGoun--your
sincerely, etcetera."

This is the version of his letter which he received, typed, from Miss
McGoun that afternoon:

     BABBITT-THOMPSON REALTY CO.
     Homes for Folks
     Reeves Bldg., Oberlin Avenue & 3d St., N.E
     Zenith

Omar Gribble, Esq., 376 North American Building, Zenith.

Dear Mr. Gribble:

Your letter of the twentieth to hand. I must say I'm awfully afraid that
if we go on shilly-shallying like this we'll just naturally lose the
Allen sale. I had Allen up on the carpet day before yesterday, and got
right down to cases. All my experience indicates that he means to do
business. I have also looked into his financial record, which is fine.

He is perfectly willing to pro rate the special assessment and there
will be no difficulty in getting him to pay for title insurance.

SO LET'S GO! Yours sincerely,

As he read and signed it, in his correct flowing business-college hand,
Babbitt reflected, "Now that's a good, strong letter, and clear's a
bell. Now what the--I never told McGoun to make a third paragraph there!
Wish she'd quit trying to improve on my dictation! But what I can't
understand is: why can't Stan Graff or Chet Laylock write a letter like
that? With punch! With a kick!"

The most important thing he dictated that morning was the fortnightly
form-letter, to be mimeographed and sent out to a thousand "prospects."
It was diligently imitative of the best literary models of the day; of
heart-to-heart-talk advertisements, "sales-pulling" letters, discourses
on the "development of Will-power," and hand-shaking house-organs,
as richly poured forth by the new school of Poets of Business. He had
painfully written out a first draft, and he intoned it now like a poet
delicate and distrait:

SAY, OLD MAN! I just want to know can I do you a whaleuva favor? Honest!
No kidding! I know you're interested in getting a house, not merely a
place where you hang up the old bonnet but a love-nest for the wife and
kiddies--and maybe for the flivver out beyant (be sure and spell that
b-e-y-a-n-t, Miss McGoun) the spud garden. Say, did you ever stop
to think that we're here to save you trouble? That's how we make a
living--folks don't pay us for our lovely beauty! Now take a look:

Sit right down at the handsome carved mahogany escritoire and shoot us
in a line telling us just what you want, and if we can find it we'll
come hopping down your lane with the good tidings, and if we can't, we
won't bother you. To save your time, just fill out the blank enclosed.
On request will also send blank regarding store properties in Floral
Heights, Silver Grove, Linton, Bellevue, and all East Side residential
districts.

Yours for service,

P.S.--Just a hint of some plums we can pick for you--some genuine
bargains that came in to-day:

SILVER GROVE.--Cute four-room California bungalow, a.m.i., garage, dandy
shade tree, swell neighborhood, handy car line. $3700, $780 down and
balance liberal, Babbitt-Thompson terms, cheaper than rent.

DORCHESTER.--A corker! Artistic two-family house, all oak trim, parquet
floors, lovely gas log, big porches, colonial, HEATED ALL-WEATHER
GARAGE, a bargain at $11,250.


Dictation over, with its need of sitting and thinking instead of
bustling around and making a noise and really doing something, Babbitt
sat creakily back in his revolving desk-chair and beamed on Miss McGoun.
He was conscious of her as a girl, of black bobbed hair against demure
cheeks. A longing which was indistinguishable from loneliness enfeebled
him. While she waited, tapping a long, precise pencil-point on the
desk-tablet, he half identified her with the fairy girl of his dreams.
He imagined their eyes meeting with terrifying recognition; imagined
touching her lips with frightened reverence and--She was chirping,
"Any more, Mist' Babbitt?" He grunted, "That winds it up, I guess," and
turned heavily away.

For all his wandering thoughts, they had never been more intimate than
this. He often reflected, "Nev' forget how old Jake Offutt said a wise
bird never goes love-making in his own office or his own home. Start
trouble. Sure. But--"

In twenty-three years of married life he had peered uneasily at every
graceful ankle, every soft shoulder; in thought he had treasured them;
but not once had he hazarded respectability by adventuring. Now, as
he calculated the cost of repapering the Styles house, he was restless
again, discontented about nothing and everything, ashamed of his
discontentment, and lonely for the fairy girl.





IT was a morning of artistic creation. Fifteen minutes after the purple
prose of Babbitt's form-letter, Chester Kirby Laylock, the resident
salesman at Glen Oriole, came in to report a sale and submit an
advertisement. Babbitt disapproved of Laylock, who sang in choirs and
was merry at home over games of Hearts and Old Maid. He had a tenor
voice, wavy chestnut hair, and a mustache like a camel's-hair brush.
Babbitt considered it excusable in a family-man to growl, "Seen this
new picture of the kid--husky little devil, eh?" but Laylock's domestic
confidences were as bubbling as a girl's.

"Say, I think I got a peach of an ad for the Glen, Mr. Babbitt.
Why don't we try something in poetry? Honest, it'd have wonderful
pulling-power. Listen:

     'Mid pleasures and palaces,
     Wherever you may roam,
     You just provide the little bride
     And we'll provide the home.

Do you get it? See--like 'Home Sweet Home.' Don't you--"

"Yes, yes, yes, hell yes, of course I get it. But--Oh, I think we'd
better use something more dignified and forceful, like 'We lead, others
follow,' or 'Eventually, why not now?' Course I believe in using
poetry and humor and all that junk when it turns the trick, but with a
high-class restricted development like the Glen we better stick to the
more dignified approach, see how I mean? Well, I guess that's all, this
morning, Chet."


II

By a tragedy familiar to the world of art, the April enthusiasm of Chet
Laylock served only to stimulate the talent of the older craftsman,
George F. Babbitt. He grumbled to Stanley Graff, "That tan-colored voice
of Chet's gets on my nerves," yet he was aroused and in one swoop he
wrote:

DO YOU RESPECT YOUR LOVED ONES?

When the last sad rites of bereavement are over, do you know for certain
that you have done your best for the Departed? You haven't unless they
lie in the Cemetery Beautiful,

LINDEN LANE

the only strictly up-to-date burial place in or near Zenith, where
exquisitely gardened plots look from daisy-dotted hill-slopes across the
smiling fields of Dorchester.

     Sole agents
     BABBITT-THOMPSON REALTY COMPANY
     Reeves Building

He rejoiced, "I guess that'll show Chan Mott and his weedy old Wildwood
Cemetery something about modern merchandizing!"


III

He sent Mat Penniman to the recorder's office to dig out the names
of the owners of houses which were displaying For Rent signs of other
brokers; he talked to a man who desired to lease a store-building for
a pool-room; he ran over the list of home-leases which were about to
expire; he sent Thomas Bywaters, a street-car conductor who played at
real estate in spare time, to call on side-street "prospects" who were
unworthy the strategies of Stanley Graff. But he had spent his credulous
excitement of creation, and these routine details annoyed him. One
moment of heroism he had, in discovering a new way of stopping smoking.

He stopped smoking at least once a month. He went through with it like
the solid citizen he was: admitted the evils of tobacco, courageously
made resolves, laid out plans to check the vice, tapered off his
allowance of cigars, and expounded the pleasures of virtuousness to
every one he met. He did everything, in fact, except stop smoking.

Two months before, by ruling out a schedule, noting down the hour and
minute of each smoke, and ecstatically increasing the intervals between
smokes, he had brought himself down to three cigars a day. Then he had
lost the schedule.

A week ago he had invented a system of leaving his cigar-case
and cigarette-box in an unused drawer at the bottom of the
correspondence-file, in the outer office. "I'll just naturally be
ashamed to go poking in there all day long, making a fool of myself
before my own employees!" he reasoned. By the end of three days he was
trained to leave his desk, walk to the file, take out and light a cigar,
without knowing that he was doing it.

This morning it was revealed to him that it had been too easy to open
the file. Lock it, that was the thing! Inspired, he rushed out and
locked up his cigars, his cigarettes, and even his box of safety
matches; and the key to the file drawer he hid in his desk. But the
crusading passion of it made him so tobacco-hungry that he immediately
recovered the key, walked with forbidding dignity to the file, took out
a cigar and a match--"but only one match; if ole cigar goes out, it'll
by golly have to stay out!" Later, when the cigar did go out, he took
one more match from the file, and when a buyer and a seller came in for
a conference at eleven-thirty, naturally he had to offer them cigars.
His conscience protested, "Why, you're smoking with them!" but he
bullied it, "Oh, shut up! I'm busy now. Of course by-and-by--" There was
no by-and-by, yet his belief that he had crushed the unclean habit made
him feel noble and very happy. When he called up Paul Riesling he was,
in his moral splendor, unusually eager.

He was fonder of Paul Riesling than of any one on earth except himself
and his daughter Tinka. They had been classmates, roommates, in the
State University, but always he thought of Paul Riesling, with his dark
slimness, his precisely parted hair, his nose-glasses, his hesitant
speech, his moodiness, his love of music, as a younger brother, to be
petted and protected. Paul had gone into his father's business,
after graduation; he was now a wholesaler and small manufacturer of
prepared-paper roofing. But Babbitt strenuously believed and lengthily
announced to the world of Good Fellows that Paul could have been a great
violinist or painter or writer. "Why say, the letters that boy sent me
on his trip to the Canadian Rockies, they just absolutely make you see
the place as if you were standing there. Believe me, he could have given
any of these bloomin' authors a whale of a run for their money!"

Yet on the telephone they said only:

"South 343. No, no, no! I said SOUTH--South 343. Say, operator, what
the dickens is the trouble? Can't you get me South 343? Why certainly
they'll answer. Oh, Hello, 343? Wanta speak Mist' Riesling, Mist'
Babbitt talking. . . 'Lo, Paul?"

"Yuh."

"'S George speaking."

"Yuh."

"How's old socks?"

"Fair to middlin'. How 're you?"

"Fine, Paulibus. Well, what do you know?"

"Oh, nothing much."

"Where you been keepin' yourself?"

"Oh, just stickin' round. What's up, Georgie?"

"How 'bout lil lunch 's noon?"

"Be all right with me, I guess. Club?'

"Yuh. Meet you there twelve-thirty."

"A' right. Twelve-thirty. S' long, Georgie."


IV

His morning was not sharply marked into divisions. Interwoven with
correspondence and advertisement-writing were a thousand nervous
details: calls from clerks who were incessantly and hopefully seeking
five furnished rooms and bath at sixty dollars a month; advice to Mat
Penniman on getting money out of tenants who had no money.

Babbitt's virtues as a real-estate broker--as the servant of society in
the department of finding homes for families and shops for distributors
of food--were steadiness and diligence. He was conventionally honest, he
kept his records of buyers and sellers complete, he had experience with
leases and titles and an excellent memory for prices. His shoulders were
broad enough, his voice deep enough, his relish of hearty humor strong
enough, to establish him as one of the ruling caste of Good Fellows. Yet
his eventual importance to mankind was perhaps lessened by his large and
complacent ignorance of all architecture save the types of houses turned
out by speculative builders; all landscape gardening save the use of
curving roads, grass, and six ordinary shrubs; and all the commonest
axioms of economics. He serenely believed that the one purpose of the
real-estate business was to make money for George F. Babbitt. True,
it was a good advertisement at Boosters' Club lunches, and all the
varieties of Annual Banquets to which Good Fellows were invited, to
speak sonorously of Unselfish Public Service, the Broker's Obligation
to Keep Inviolate the Trust of His Clients, and a thing called Ethics,
whose nature was confusing but if you had it you were a High-class
Realtor and if you hadn't you were a shyster, a piker, and a
fly-by-night. These virtues awakened Confidence, and enabled you to
handle Bigger Propositions. But they didn't imply that you were to be
impractical and refuse to take twice the value of a house if a buyer was
such an idiot that he didn't jew you down on the asking-price.

Babbitt spoke well--and often--at these orgies of commercial
righteousness about the "realtor's function as a seer of the future
development of the community, and as a prophetic engineer clearing the
pathway for inevitable changes"--which meant that a real-estate broker
could make money by guessing which way the town would grow. This
guessing he called Vision.

In an address at the Boosters' Club he had admitted, "It is at once the
duty and the privilege of the realtor to know everything about his own
city and its environs. Where a surgeon is a specialist on every vein and
mysterious cell of the human body, and the engineer upon electricity in
all its phases, or every bolt of some great bridge majestically arching
o'er a mighty flood, the realtor must know his city, inch by inch, and
all its faults and virtues."

Though he did know the market-price, inch by inch, of certain districts
of Zenith, he did not know whether the police force was too large or too
small, or whether it was in alliance with gambling and prostitution.
He knew the means of fire-proofing buildings and the relation of
insurance-rates to fire-proofing, but he did not know how many firemen
there were in the city, how they were trained and paid, or how complete
their apparatus. He sang eloquently the advantages of proximity of
school-buildings to rentable homes, but he did not know--he did not
know that it was worth while to know--whether the city schoolrooms were
properly heated, lighted, ventilated, furnished; he did not know how the
teachers were chosen; and though he chanted "One of the boasts of Zenith
is that we pay our teachers adequately," that was because he had read
the statement in the Advocate-Times. Himself, he could not have given
the average salary of teachers in Zenith or anywhere else.

He had heard it said that "conditions" in the County Jail and the Zenith
City Prison were not very "scientific;" he had, with indignation at the
criticism of Zenith, skimmed through a report in which the notorious
pessimist Seneca Doane, the radical lawyer, asserted that to throw
boys and young girls into a bull-pen crammed with men suffering from
syphilis, delirium tremens, and insanity was not the perfect way of
educating them. He had controverted the report by growling, "Folks that
think a jail ought to be a bloomin' Hotel Thornleigh make me sick. If
people don't like a jail, let 'em behave 'emselves and keep out of it.
Besides, these reform cranks always exaggerate." That was the beginning
and quite completely the end of his investigations into Zenith's
charities and corrections; and as to the "vice districts" he brightly
expressed it, "Those are things that no decent man monkeys with.
Besides, smatter fact, I'll tell you confidentially: it's a protection
to our daughters and to decent women to have a district where tough nuts
can raise cain. Keeps 'em away from our own homes."

As to industrial conditions, however, Babbitt had thought a great deal,
and his opinions may be coordinated as follows:

"A good labor union is of value because it keeps out radical unions,
which would destroy property. No one ought to be forced to belong to a
union, however. All labor agitators who try to force men to join a union
should be hanged. In fact, just between ourselves, there oughtn't to
be any unions allowed at all; and as it's the best way of fighting the
unions, every business man ought to belong to an employers'-association
and to the Chamber of Commerce. In union there is strength. So any
selfish hog who doesn't join the Chamber of Commerce ought to be forced
to."

In nothing--as the expert on whose advice families moved to new
neighborhoods to live there for a generation--was Babbitt more
splendidly innocent than in the science of sanitation. He did not know
a malaria-bearing mosquito from a bat; he knew nothing about tests of
drinking water; and in the matters of plumbing and sewage he was as
unlearned as he was voluble. He often referred to the excellence of the
bathrooms in the houses he sold. He was fond of explaining why it
was that no European ever bathed. Some one had told him, when he was
twenty-two, that all cesspools were unhealthy, and he still denounced
them. If a client impertinently wanted him to sell a house which had a
cesspool, Babbitt always spoke about it--before accepting the house and
selling it.

When he laid out the Glen Oriole acreage development, when he ironed
woodland and dipping meadow into a glenless, orioleless, sunburnt flat
prickly with small boards displaying the names of imaginary streets, he
righteously put in a complete sewage-system. It made him feel superior;
it enabled him to sneer privily at the Martin Lumsen development,
Avonlea, which had a cesspool; and it provided a chorus for the
full-page advertisements in which he announced the beauty, convenience,
cheapness, and supererogatory healthfulness of Glen Oriole. The only
flaw was that the Glen Oriole sewers had insufficient outlet, so that
waste remained in them, not very agreeably, while the Avonlea cesspool
was a Waring septic tank.

The whole of the Glen Oriole project was a suggestion that Babbitt,
though he really did hate men recognized as swindlers, was not too
unreasonably honest. Operators and buyers prefer that brokers should
not be in competition with them as operators and buyers themselves,
but attend to their clients' interests only. It was supposed that the
Babbitt-Thompson Company were merely agents for Glen Oriole, serving
the real owner, Jake Offutt, but the fact was that Babbitt and Thompson
owned sixty-two per cent. of the Glen, the president and purchasing
agent of the Zenith Street Traction Company owned twenty-eight per
cent., and Jake Offutt (a gang-politician, a small manufacturer,
a tobacco-chewing old farceur who enjoyed dirty politics, business
diplomacy, and cheating at poker) had only ten per cent., which
Babbitt and the Traction officials had given to him for "fixing" health
inspectors and fire inspectors and a member of the State Transportation
Commission.

But Babbitt was virtuous. He advocated, though he did not practise, the
prohibition of alcohol; he praised, though he did not obey, the laws
against motor-speeding; he paid his debts; he contributed to the church,
the Red Cross, and the Y. M. C. A.; he followed the custom of his
clan and cheated only as it was sanctified by precedent; and he never
descended to trickery--though, as he explained to Paul Riesling:

"Course I don't mean to say that every ad I write is literally true or
that I always believe everything I say when I give some buyer a good
strong selling-spiel. You see--you see it's like this: In the first
place, maybe the owner of the property exaggerated when he put it into
my hands, and it certainly isn't my place to go proving my principal
a liar! And then most folks are so darn crooked themselves that they
expect a fellow to do a little lying, so if I was fool enough to never
whoop the ante I'd get the credit for lying anyway! In self-defense I
got to toot my own horn, like a lawyer defending a client--his bounden
duty, ain't it, to bring out the poor dub's good points? Why, the Judge
himself would bawl out a lawyer that didn't, even if they both knew
the guy was guilty! But even so, I don't pad out the truth like Cecil
Rountree or Thayer or the rest of these realtors. Fact, I think a fellow
that's willing to deliberately up and profit by lying ought to be shot!"

Babbitt's value to his clients was rarely better shown than this
morning, in the conference at eleven-thirty between himself, Conrad
Lyte, and Archibald Purdy.


V

Conrad Lyte was a real-estate speculator. He was a nervous speculator.
Before he gambled he consulted bankers, lawyers, architects, contracting
builders, and all of their clerks and stenographers who were willing
to be cornered and give him advice. He was a bold entrepreneur, and he
desired nothing more than complete safety in his investments, freedom
from attention to details, and the thirty or forty per cent. profit
which, according to all authorities, a pioneer deserves for his risks
and foresight. He was a stubby man with a cap-like mass of short gray
curls and clothes which, no matter how well cut, seemed shaggy. Below
his eyes were semicircular hollows, as though silver dollars had been
pressed against them and had left an imprint.

Particularly and always Lyte consulted Babbitt, and trusted in his slow
cautiousness.

Six months ago Babbitt had learned that one Archibald Purdy, a grocer
in the indecisive residential district known as Linton, was talking of
opening a butcher shop beside his grocery. Looking up the ownership of
adjoining parcels of land, Babbitt found that Purdy owned his present
shop but did not own the one available lot adjoining. He advised Conrad
Lyte to purchase this lot, for eleven thousand dollars, though an
appraisal on a basis of rents did not indicate its value as above nine
thousand. The rents, declared Babbitt, were too low; and by waiting they
could make Purdy come to their price. (This was Vision.) He had to bully
Lyte into buying. His first act as agent for Lyte was to increase the
rent of the battered store-building on the lot. The tenant said a number
of rude things, but he paid.

Now, Purdy seemed ready to buy, and his delay was going to cost him ten
thousand extra dollars--the reward paid by the community to Mr. Conrad
Lyte for the virtue of employing a broker who had Vision and
who understood Talking Points, Strategic Values, Key Situations,
Underappraisals, and the Psychology of Salesmanship.

Lyte came to the conference exultantly. He was fond of Babbitt, this
morning, and called him "old hoss." Purdy, the grocer, a long-nosed man
and solemn, seemed to care less for Babbitt and for Vision, but Babbitt
met him at the street door of the office and guided him toward the
private room with affectionate little cries of "This way, Brother
Purdy!" He took from the correspondence-file the entire box of cigars
and forced them on his guests. He pushed their chairs two inches forward
and three inches back, which gave an hospitable note, then leaned
back in his desk-chair and looked plump and jolly. But he spoke to the
weakling grocer with firmness.

"Well, Brother Purdy, we been having some pretty tempting offers from
butchers and a slew of other folks for that lot next to your store,
but I persuaded Brother Lyte that we ought to give you a shot at the
property first. I said to Lyte, 'It'd be a rotten shame,' I said, 'if
somebody went and opened a combination grocery and meat market right
next door and ruined Purdy's nice little business.' Especially--"
Babbitt leaned forward, and his voice was harsh, "--it would be hard
luck if one of these cash-and-carry chain-stores got in there and
started cutting prices below cost till they got rid of competition and
forced you to the wall!"

Purdy snatched his thin hands from his pockets, pulled up his trousers,
thrust his hands back into his pockets, tilted in the heavy oak chair,
and tried to look amused, as he struggled:

"Yes, they're bad competition. But I guess you don't realize the Pulling
Power that Personality has in a neighborhood business."

The great Babbitt smiled. "That's so. Just as you feel, old man. We
thought we'd give you first chance. All right then--"

"Now look here!" Purdy wailed. "I know f'r a fact that a piece of
property 'bout same size, right near, sold for less 'n eighty-five
hundred, 'twa'n't two years ago, and here you fellows are asking me
twenty-four thousand dollars! Why, I'd have to mortgage--I wouldn't mind
so much paying twelve thousand but--Why good God, Mr. Babbitt, you're
asking more 'n twice its value! And threatening to ruin me if I don't
take it!"

"Purdy, I don't like your way of talking! I don't like it one little
bit! Supposing Lyte and I were stinking enough to want to ruin any
fellow human, don't you suppose we know it's to our own selfish interest
to have everybody in Zenith prosperous? But all this is beside
the point. Tell you what we'll do: We'll come down to twenty-three
thousand-five thousand down and the rest on mortgage--and if you want to
wreck the old shack and rebuild, I guess I can get Lyte here to loosen
up for a building-mortgage on good liberal terms. Heavens, man, we'd
be glad to oblige you! We don't like these foreign grocery trusts any
better 'n you do! But it isn't reasonable to expect us to sacrifice
eleven thousand or more just for neighborliness, IS it! How about it,
Lyte? You willing to come down?"

By warmly taking Purdy's part, Babbitt persuaded the benevolent Mr. Lyte
to reduce his price to twenty-one thousand dollars. At the right moment
Babbitt snatched from a drawer the agreement he had had Miss McGoun type
out a week ago and thrust it into Purdy's hands. He genially shook his
fountain pen to make certain that it was flowing, handed it to Purdy,
and approvingly watched him sign.

The work of the world was being done. Lyte had made something over
nine thousand dollars, Babbitt had made a four-hundred-and-fifty dollar
commission, Purdy had, by the sensitive mechanism of modern finance,
been provided with a business-building, and soon the happy inhabitants
of Linton would have meat lavished upon them at prices only a little
higher than those down-town.

It had been a manly battle, but after it Babbitt drooped. This was the
only really amusing contest he had been planning. There was nothing
ahead save details of leases, appraisals, mortgages.

He muttered, "Makes me sick to think of Lyte carrying off most of the
profit when I did all the work, the old skinflint! And--What else have
I got to do to-day?... Like to take a good long vacation. Motor trip.
Something." He sprang up, rekindled by the thought of lunching with Paul
Riesling.

 On a morning in April 1920, George F. Babbitt, a 46-year-old real estate dealer, awakens in his house in the exclusive Floral Heights section of Zenith, a medium-sized, Midwestern city. Zenith is a typically expanding modern city with new factories and office buildings, modern homes, fine roads and express railroad service, as well as the usual slums and other urban paraphernalia. Babbitt is pink-skinned and baby-faced, with a slight tendency toward heaviness. He seems prosperous, although he is a businesslike and unromantic person in appearance. He has awakened unhappily this morning -- partly because he is suffering from a hangover following last night's poker game, and partly because, as usual, he has dreamed about a fairy girl with whom he is able to escape his dull, mechanical existence. This morning, he is forced to face reality and it takes him awhile to adjust. Babbitt arises at 7:20 a.m. and carries out his regular morning ritual of washing and dressing. His actions and thoughts are the same as those on nearly every morning of his life. Myra Babbitt, his wife, also rises and begins her household duties. She is a chubby, mature woman, dressed in a housecoat. After a typical quandary concerning whether Babbitt should wear his brown or gray suit, he finishes dressing. Before Babbitt leaves the bedroom, he views himself in the mirror and takes pride in his eminently respectable and executive-like bearing. He glances out the window and catches a glimpse of downtown Zenith, three miles away. The functional beauty of the tall, shining skyscrapers inspires him; he feels a nearly religious feeling of awe for the modern, urban way of life in America. Babbitt's house is moderately expensive and modern. It has all the latest conveniences and appliances and was designed, decorated, and furnished by the finest and most stylish contractors. It is quite similar, both inside and outside, to nearly all the other houses in Floral Heights. The only fault with the Babbitt house, the author comments, is that it is not a home. At breakfast, the Babbitts are joined by their three children -- Verona, 22, a recent graduate of Bryn Mawr and very conscious of her culture and sophistication; Ted -- Theodore Roosevelt -- Babbitt, 17, a student at the local high school; and Tinka -- Katherine -- 10, a somewhat spoiled yet sweet little girl. Throughout the meal, the family bickers about a number of minor issues. Babbitt is suffering from his usual morning irritability, and it is finally necessary for him to shout them into silence. The children leave for school or work, and Babbitt sets out for the office. As he drives to work, he meets his neighbor Howard Littlefield, an executive of the Zenith Street Traction Company and the holder of a doctorate in economics. Howard is one of the most highly educated men in Floral Heights, and Babbitt is one of the many admirers of his learning. The two men engage in a short, cliche-filled discussion about the weather and current politics. Continuing his journey, Babbitt derives an adventurous feeling of personal heroism from driving recklessly. At the gasoline station where he stops, the mechanic is attentive and respectful. This behavior, as usual, tends to increase Babbitt's self-esteem, and he becomes a bit more cheerful. As on all other mornings, the drive to work through the city's many varied and industrious districts excites and inspires him. Babbitt's office is in the Reeves Building, a modern, downtown skyscraper. The Babbitt-Thompson Realty Company has nine salesmen and several office clerks, most of whom are already busily at work. For some unknown reason, however, Babbitt feels out of sorts this morning and does not derive the usual satisfaction from viewing the modern fixtures of his office. Nonetheless, he settles down to the day's business. He continues, however, to feel restless. Babbitt muses for a while about the fairy girl of his dreams, and then feels ashamed, for he is a highly respectable family man and has never yet done anything to endanger his reputation in the community. As the morning progresses, Babbitt composes several additional advertisements, including a rather tasteless one for a cemetery of which he is the agent, These ads are written in tortured and misleading purple prose, but Babbitt is proud of them and considers them to be stylistic masterpieces. When this work is finished, he becomes bored and, as is his habit, he decides once again to stop smoking. Afterward, he telephones Paul Riesling, his closest friend, and arranges a luncheon appointment. The remainder of Babbitt's morning is filled up with petty and routine details. After describing these, Lewis comments that Babbitt is a successful real-estate broker because he is reasonably honest and dependable, has a good sales personality, and is diligent. Unfortunately, however, like many men in his field, Babbitt is ignorant of the most elementary and important matters pertinent to real-estate, such as the principles of scientific sanitation, the nature of adequate educational facilities, police and fire services, and so forth. Nonetheless, Babbitt understands real-estate values, and he is not above making a slightly shady deal once in a while if it is profitable and has an air of respectability. As a result, Babbitt's firm is one of the most prosperous in Zenith. Babbitt is seemingly a highly virtuous man. He advocates and praises the wisdom of many laws, although he does not always observe them. He is a regular contributor to his church and other reliable charities. He does not believe in cheating -- except when everyone else is doing it, or when it is necessary in order to protect himself. The balance of the chapter contains a detailed account of the way in which Babbitt and Conrad Lyte, a local speculator, pull off a slightly dishonest real-estate deal and make a nice profit, at the expense of a helpless grocer in one of Zenith's residential districts.

