Chapter: BABBITT'S preparations for leaving the office to its feeble self during
the hour and a half of his lunch-period were somewhat less elaborate
than the plans for a general European war.

He fretted to Miss McGoun, "What time you going to lunch? Well, make
sure Miss Bannigan is in then. Explain to her that if Wiedenfeldt calls
up, she's to tell him I'm already having the title traced. And oh,
b' the way, remind me to-morrow to have Penniman trace it. Now if anybody
comes in looking for a cheap house, remember we got to shove that Bangor
Road place off onto somebody. If you need me, I'll be at the Athletic
Club. And--uh--And--uh--I'll be back by two."

He dusted the cigar-ashes off his vest. He placed a difficult unanswered
letter on the pile of unfinished work, that he might not fail to attend
to it that afternoon. (For three noons, now, he had placed the same
letter on the unfinished pile.) He scrawled on a sheet of yellow
backing-paper the memorandum: "See abt apt h drs," which gave him an
agreeable feeling of having already seen about the apartment-house
doors.

He discovered that he was smoking another cigar. He threw it away,
protesting, "Darn it, I thought you'd quit this darn smoking!" He
courageously returned the cigar-box to the correspondence-file, locked
it up, hid the key in a more difficult place, and raged, "Ought to take
care of myself. And need more exercise--walk to the club, every single
noon--just what I'll do--every noon--cut out this motoring all the time."

The resolution made him feel exemplary. Immediately after it he decided
that this noon it was too late to walk.

It took but little more time to start his car and edge it into the
traffic than it would have taken to walk the three and a half blocks to
the club.


II

As he drove he glanced with the fondness of familiarity at the
buildings.

A stranger suddenly dropped into the business-center of Zenith could not
have told whether he was in a city of Oregon or Georgia, Ohio or Maine,
Oklahoma or Manitoba. But to Babbitt every inch was individual and
stirring. As always he noted that the California Building across the way
was three stories lower, therefore three stories less beautiful, than
his own Reeves Building. As always when he passed the Parthenon Shoe
Shine Parlor, a one-story hut which beside the granite and red-brick
ponderousness of the old California Building resembled a bath-house
under a cliff, he commented, "Gosh, ought to get my shoes shined this
afternoon. Keep forgetting it." At the Simplex Office Furniture Shop,
the National Cash Register Agency, he yearned for a dictaphone, for a
typewriter which would add and multiply, as a poet yearns for quartos or
a physician for radium.

At the Nobby Men's Wear Shop he took his left hand off the
steering-wheel to touch his scarf, and thought well of himself as one
who bought expensive ties "and could pay cash for 'em, too, by golly;"
and at the United Cigar Store, with its crimson and gold alertness, he
reflected, "Wonder if I need some cigars--idiot--plumb forgot--going
t' cut down my fool smoking." He looked at his bank, the Miners' and
Drovers' National, and considered how clever and solid he was to bank
with so marbled an establishment. His high moment came in the clash
of traffic when he was halted at the corner beneath the lofty Second
National Tower. His car was banked with four others in a line of steel
restless as cavalry, while the cross town traffic, limousines and
enormous moving-vans and insistent motor-cycles, poured by; on the
farther corner, pneumatic riveters rang on the sun-plated skeleton of
a new building; and out of this tornado flashed the inspiration of
a familiar face, and a fellow Booster shouted, "H' are you, George!"
Babbitt waved in neighborly affection, and slid on with the traffic as
the policeman lifted his hand. He noted how quickly his car picked up.
He felt superior and powerful, like a shuttle of polished steel darting
in a vast machine.

As always he ignored the next two blocks, decayed blocks not yet
reclaimed from the grime and shabbiness of the Zenith of 1885. While
he was passing the five-and-ten-cent store, the Dakota Lodging House,
Concordia Hall with its lodge-rooms and the offices of fortune-tellers
and chiropractors, he thought of how much money he made, and he boasted
a little and worried a little and did old familiar sums:

"Four hundred fifty plunks this morning from the Lyte deal. But taxes
due. Let's see: I ought to pull out eight thousand net this year, and
save fifteen hundred of that--no, not if I put up garage and--Let's
see: six hundred and forty clear last month, and twelve times six-forty
makes--makes--let see: six times twelve is seventy-two hundred and--Oh
rats, anyway, I'll make eight thousand--gee now, that's not so bad;
mighty few fellows pulling down eight thousand dollars a year--eight
thousand good hard iron dollars--bet there isn't more than five per
cent. of the people in the whole United States that make more than
Uncle George does, by golly! Right up at the top of the heap! But--Way
expenses are--Family wasting gasoline, and always dressed like
millionaires, and sending that eighty a month to Mother--And all these
stenographers and salesmen gouging me for every cent they can get--"

The effect of his scientific budget-planning was that he felt at once
triumphantly wealthy and perilously poor, and in the midst of
these dissertations he stopped his car, rushed into a small
news-and-miscellany shop, and bought the electric cigar-lighter which
he had coveted for a week. He dodged his conscience by being jerky and
noisy, and by shouting at the clerk, "Guess this will prett' near pay
for itself in matches, eh?"

It was a pretty thing, a nickeled cylinder with an almost silvery
socket, to be attached to the dashboard of his car. It was not only, as
the placard on the counter observed, "a dandy little refinement,
lending the last touch of class to a gentleman's auto," but a priceless
time-saver. By freeing him from halting the car to light a match, it
would in a month or two easily save ten minutes.

As he drove on he glanced at it. "Pretty nice. Always wanted one," he
said wistfully. "The one thing a smoker needs, too."

Then he remembered that he had given up smoking.

"Darn it!" he mourned. "Oh well, I suppose I'll hit a cigar once in a
while. And--Be a great convenience for other folks. Might make just
the difference in getting chummy with some fellow that would put over
a sale. And--Certainly looks nice there. Certainly is a mighty clever
little jigger. Gives the last touch of refinement and class. I--By
golly, I guess I can afford it if I want to! Not going to be the only
member of this family that never has a single doggone luxury!"

Thus, laden with treasure, after three and a half blocks of romantic
adventure, he drove up to the club.


III

The Zenith Athletic Club is not athletic and it isn't exactly a club,
but it is Zenith in perfection. It has an active and smoke-misted
billiard room, it is represented by baseball and football teams, and in
the pool and the gymnasium a tenth of the members sporadically try to
reduce. But most of its three thousand members use it as a cafe in which
to lunch, play cards, tell stories, meet customers, and entertain out-of
town uncles at dinner. It is the largest club in the city, and its chief
hatred is the conservative Union Club, which all sound members of the
Athletic call "a rotten, snobbish, dull, expensive old hole--not one
Good Mixer in the place--you couldn't hire me to join." Statistics show
that no member of the Athletic has ever refused election to the Union,
and of those who are elected, sixty-seven per cent. resign from the
Athletic and are thereafter heard to say, in the drowsy sanctity of the
Union lounge, "The Athletic would be a pretty good hotel, if it were
more exclusive."

The Athletic Club building is nine stories high, yellow brick with
glassy roof-garden above and portico of huge limestone columns below.
The lobby, with its thick pillars of porous Caen stone, its pointed
vaulting, and a brown glazed-tile floor like well-baked bread-crust, is
a combination of cathedral-crypt and rathskellar. The members rush into
the lobby as though they were shopping and hadn't much time for it. Thus
did Babbitt enter, and to the group standing by the cigar-counter he
whooped, "How's the boys? How's the boys? Well, well, fine day!"

Jovially they whooped back--Vergil Gunch, the coal-dealer, Sidney
Finkelstein, the ladies'-ready-to-wear buyer for Parcher & Stein's
department-store, and Professor Joseph K. Pumphrey, owner of the Riteway
Business College and instructor in Public Speaking, Business English,
Scenario Writing, and Commercial Law. Though Babbitt admired this
savant, and appreciated Sidney Finkelstein as "a mighty smart buyer
and a good liberal spender," it was to Vergil Gunch that he turned with
enthusiasm. Mr. Gunch was president of the Boosters' Club, a weekly
lunch-club, local chapter of a national organization which promoted
sound business and friendliness among Regular Fellows. He was also no
less an official than Esteemed Leading Knight in the Benevolent and
Protective Order of Elks, and it was rumored that at the next election
he would be a candidate for Exalted Ruler. He was a jolly man, given to
oratory and to chumminess with the arts. He called on the famous
actors and vaudeville artists when they came to town, gave them cigars,
addressed them by their first names, and--sometimes--succeeded
in bringing them to the Boosters' lunches to give The Boys a Free
Entertainment. He was a large man with hair en brosse, and he knew the
latest jokes, but he played poker close to the chest. It was at his
party that Babbitt had sucked in the virus of to-day's restlessness.

Gunch shouted, "How's the old Bolsheviki? How do you feel, the morning
after the night before?"

"Oh, boy! Some head! That was a regular party you threw, Verg! Hope
you haven't forgotten I took that last cute little jack-pot!" Babbitt
bellowed. (He was three feet from Gunch.)

"That's all right now! What I'll hand you next time, Georgie! Say, juh
notice in the paper the way the New York Assembly stood up to the Reds?"

"You bet I did. That was fine, eh? Nice day to-day."

"Yes, it's one mighty fine spring day, but nights still cold."

"Yeh, you're right they are! Had to have coupla blankets last night,
out on the sleeping-porch. Say, Sid," Babbitt turned to Finkelstein, the
buyer, "got something wanta ask you about. I went out and bought me an
electric cigar-lighter for the car, this noon, and--"

"Good hunch!" said Finkelstein, while even the learned Professor
Pumphrey, a bulbous man with a pepper-and-salt cutaway and a pipe-organ
voice, commented, "That makes a dandy accessory. Cigar-lighter gives
tone to the dashboard."

"Yep, finally decided I'd buy me one. Got the best on the market, the
clerk said it was. Paid five bucks for it. Just wondering if I got
stuck. What do they charge for 'em at the store, Sid?"

Finkelstein asserted that five dollars was not too great a sum, not for
a really high-class lighter which was suitably nickeled and provided
with connections of the very best quality. "I always say--and believe
me, I base it on a pretty fairly extensive mercantile experience--the
best is the cheapest in the long run. Of course if a fellow wants to be
a Jew about it, he can get cheap junk, but in the long RUN, the cheapest
thing is--the best you can get! Now you take here just th' other day:
I got a new top for my old boat and some upholstery, and I paid out a
hundred and twenty-six fifty, and of course a lot of fellows would say
that was too much--Lord, if the Old Folks--they live in one of these
hick towns up-state and they simply can't get onto the way a city
fellow's mind works, and then, of course, they're Jews, and they'd
lie right down and die if they knew Sid had anted up a hundred and
twenty-six bones. But I don't figure I was stuck, George, not a bit.
Machine looks brand new now--not that it's so darned old, of course; had
it less 'n three years, but I give it hard service; never drive less
'n a hundred miles on Sunday and, uh--Oh, I don't really think you
got stuck, George. In the LONG run, the best is, you might say, it's
unquestionably the cheapest."

"That's right," said Vergil Gunch. "That's the way I look at it. If a
fellow is keyed up to what you might call intensive living, the way you
get it here in Zenith--all the hustle and mental activity that's going
on with a bunch of live-wires like the Boosters and here in the Z.A.C.,
why, he's got to save his nerves by having the best."

Babbitt nodded his head at every fifth word in the roaring rhythm; and
by the conclusion, in Gunch's renowned humorous vein, he was enchanted:

"Still, at that, George, don't know's you can afford it. I've heard your
business has been kind of under the eye of the gov'ment since you stole
the tail of Eathorne Park and sold it!"

"Oh, you're a great little josher, Verg. But when it comes to kidding,
how about this report that you stole the black marble steps off the
post-office and sold 'em for high-grade coal!" In delight Babbitt patted
Gunch's back, stroked his arm.

"That's all right, but what I want to know is: who's the real-estate
shark that bought that coal for his apartment-houses?"


"I guess that'll hold you for a while, George!" said Finkelstein. "I'll
tell you, though, boys, what I did hear: George's missus went into the
gents' wear department at Parcher's to buy him some collars, and before
she could give his neck-size the clerk slips her some thirteens. 'How
juh know the size?' says Mrs. Babbitt, and the clerk says, 'Men that
let their wives buy collars for 'em always wear thirteen, madam.' How's
that! That's pretty good, eh? How's that, eh? I guess that'll about fix
you, George!"

"I--I--" Babbitt sought for amiable insults in answer. He stopped,
stared at the door. Paul Riesling was coming in. Babbitt cried, "See you
later, boys," and hastened across the lobby. He was, just then, neither
the sulky child of the sleeping-porch, the domestic tyrant of the
breakfast table, the crafty money-changer of the Lyte-Purdy conference,
nor the blaring Good Fellow, the Josher and Regular Guy, of the Athletic
Club. He was an older brother to Paul Riesling, swift to defend him,
admiring him with a proud and credulous love passing the love of women.
Paul and he shook hands solemnly; they smiled as shyly as though they
had been parted three years, not three days--and they said:

"How's the old horse-thief?"

"All right, I guess. How're you, you poor shrimp?"

"I'm first-rate, you second-hand hunk o' cheese."

Reassured thus of their high fondness, Babbitt grunted, "You're a fine
guy, you are! Ten minutes late!" Riesling snapped, "Well, you're lucky
to have a chance to lunch with a gentleman!" They grinned and went into
the Neronian washroom, where a line of men bent over the bowls inset
along a prodigious slab of marble as in religious prostration before
their own images in the massy mirror. Voices thick, satisfied,
authoritative, hurtled along the marble walls, bounded from the ceiling
of lavender-bordered milky tiles, while the lords of the city, the
barons of insurance and law and fertilizers and motor tires, laid down
the law for Zenith; announced that the day was warm-indeed, indisputably
of spring; that wages were too high and the interest on mortgages too
low; that Babe Ruth, the eminent player of baseball, was a noble man;
and that "those two nuts at the Climax Vaudeville Theater this week
certainly are a slick pair of actors." Babbitt, though ordinarily his
voice was the surest and most episcopal of all, was silent. In the
presence of the slight dark reticence of Paul Riesling, he was awkward,
he desired to be quiet and firm and deft.

The entrance lobby of the Athletic Club was Gothic, the washroom Roman
Imperial, the lounge Spanish Mission, and the reading-room in
Chinese Chippendale, but the gem of the club was the dining-room, the
masterpiece of Ferdinand Reitman, Zenith's busiest architect. It was
lofty and half-timbered, with Tudor leaded casements, an oriel, a
somewhat musicianless musicians'-gallery, and tapestries believed
to illustrate the granting of Magna Charta. The open beams had
been hand-adzed at Jake Offutt's car-body works, the hinge; were of
hand-wrought iron, the wainscot studded with handmade wooden pegs, and
at one end of the room was a heraldic and hooded stone fireplace which
the club's advertising-pamphlet asserted to be not only larger than any
of the fireplaces in European castles but of a draught incomparably more
scientific. It was also much cleaner, as no fire had ever been built in
it.

Half of the tables were mammoth slabs which seated twenty or thirty men.
Babbitt usually sat at the one near the door, with a group including
Gunch, Finkelstein, Professor Pumphrey, Howard Littlefield, his
neighbor, T. Cholmondeley Frink, the poet and advertising-agent, and
Orville Jones, whose laundry was in many ways the best in Zenith. They
composed a club within the club, and merrily called themselves "The
Roughnecks." To-day as he passed their table the Roughnecks greeted him,
"Come on, sit in! You 'n' Paul too proud to feed with poor folks? Afraid
somebody might stick you for a bottle of Bevo, George? Strikes me you
swells are getting awful darn exclusive!"

He thundered, "You bet! We can't afford to have our reps ruined by being
seen with you tightwads!" and guided Paul to one of the small tables
beneath the musicians'-gallery. He felt guilty. At the Zenith Athletic
Club, privacy was very bad form. But he wanted Paul to himself.

That morning he had advocated lighter lunches and now he ordered nothing
but English mutton chop, radishes, peas, deep-dish apple pie, a bit of
cheese, and a pot of coffee with cream, adding, as he did invariably,
"And uh--Oh, and you might give me an order of French fried potatoes."
When the chop came he vigorously peppered it and salted it. He always
peppered and salted his meat, and vigorously, before tasting it.

Paul and he took up the spring-like quality of the spring, the virtues
of the electric cigar-lighter, and the action of the New York State
Assembly. It was not till Babbitt was thick and disconsolate with mutton
grease that he flung out:

"I wound up a nice little deal with Conrad Lyte this morning that put
five hundred good round plunks in my pocket. Pretty nice--pretty nice!
And yet--I don't know what's the matter with me to-day. Maybe it's an
attack of spring fever, or staying up too late at Verg Gunch's, or maybe
it's just the winter's work piling up, but I've felt kind of down in the
mouth all day long. Course I wouldn't beef about it to the fellows at
the Roughnecks' Table there, but you--Ever feel that way, Paul? Kind
of comes over me: here I've pretty much done all the things I ought to;
supported my family, and got a good house and a six-cylinder car, and
built up a nice little business, and I haven't any vices 'specially,
except smoking--and I'm practically cutting that out, by the way. And I
belong to the church, and play enough golf to keep in trim, and I only
associate with good decent fellows. And yet, even so, I don't know that
I'm entirely satisfied!"

It was drawled out, broken by shouts from the neighboring tables, by
mechanical love-making to the waitress, by stertorous grunts as the
coffee filled him with dizziness and indigestion. He was apologetic and
doubtful, and it was Paul, with his thin voice, who pierced the fog:

"Good Lord, George, you don't suppose it's any novelty to me to find
that we hustlers, that think we're so all-fired successful, aren't
getting much out of it? You look as if you expected me to report you as
seditious! You know what my own life's been."

"I know, old man."

"I ought to have been a fiddler, and I'm a pedler of tar-roofing! And
Zilla--Oh, I don't want to squeal, but you know as well as I do about
how inspiring a wife she is.... Typical instance last evening: We went
to the movies. There was a big crowd waiting in the lobby, us at the
tail-end. She began to push right through it with her 'Sir, how dare
you?' manner--Honestly, sometimes when I look at her and see how she's
always so made up and stinking of perfume and looking for trouble and
kind of always yelping, 'I tell yuh I'm a lady, damn yuh!'--why, I want
to kill her! Well, she keeps elbowing through the crowd, me after her,
feeling good and ashamed, till she's almost up to the velvet rope and
ready to be the next let in. But there was a little squirt of a man
there--probably been waiting half an hour--I kind of admired the little
cuss--and he turns on Zilla and says, perfectly polite, 'Madam, why are
you trying to push past me?' And she simply--God, I was so ashamed!--she
rips out at him, 'You're no gentleman,' and she drags me into it and
hollers, 'Paul, this person insulted me!' and the poor skate he got
ready to fight.

"I made out I hadn't heard them--sure! same as you wouldn't hear a
boiler-factory!--and I tried to look away--I can tell you exactly how
every tile looks in the ceiling of that lobby; there's one with brown
spots on it like the face of the devil--and all the time the people
there--they were packed in like sardines--they kept making remarks
about us, and Zilla went right on talking about the little chap, and
screeching that 'folks like him oughtn't to be admitted in a place
that's SUPPOSED to be for ladies and gentlemen,' and 'Paul, will you
kindly call the manager, so I can report this dirty rat?' and--Oof!
Maybe I wasn't glad when I could sneak inside and hide in the dark!

"After twenty-four years of that kind of thing, you don't expect me to
fall down and foam at the mouth when you hint that this sweet, clean,
respectable, moral life isn't all it's cracked up to be, do you? I can't
even talk about it, except to you, because anybody else would think I
was yellow. Maybe I am. Don't care any longer.... Gosh, you've had to
stand a lot of whining from me, first and last, Georgie!"

"Rats, now, Paul, you've never really what you could call whined.
Sometimes--I'm always blowing to Myra and the kids about what a whale of
a realtor I am, and yet sometimes I get a sneaking idea I'm not such a
Pierpont Morgan as I let on to be. But if I ever do help by jollying you
along, old Paulski, I guess maybe Saint Pete may let me in after all!"

"Yuh, you're an old blow-hard, Georgie, you cheerful cut-throat, but
you've certainly kept me going."

"Why don't you divorce Zilla?"

"Why don't I! If I only could! If she'd just give me the chance! You
couldn't hire her to divorce me, no, nor desert me. She's too fond of
her three squares and a few pounds of nut-center chocolates in between.
If she'd only be what they call unfaithful to me! George, I don't want
to be too much of a stinker; back in college I'd 've thought a man who
could say that ought to be shot at sunrise. But honestly, I'd be tickled
to death if she'd really go making love with somebody. Fat chance! Of
course she'll flirt with anything--you know how she holds hands and
laughs--that laugh--that horrible brassy laugh--the way she yaps, 'You
naughty man, you better be careful or my big husband will be after
you!'--and the guy looking me over and thinking, 'Why, you cute little
thing, you run away now or I'll spank you!' And she'll let him go just
far enough so she gets some excitement out of it and then she'll begin
to do the injured innocent and have a beautiful time wailing, 'I
didn't think you were that kind of a person.' They talk about these
demi-vierges in stories--"

"These WHATS?"

"--but the wise, hard, corseted, old married women like Zilla are worse
than any bobbed-haired girl that ever went boldly out into this-here
storm of life--and kept her umbrella slid up her sleeve! But rats, you
know what Zilla is. How she nags--nags--nags. How she wants everything I
can buy her, and a lot that I can't, and how absolutely unreasonable she
is, and when I get sore and try to have it out with her she plays the
Perfect Lady so well that even I get fooled and get all tangled up in
a lot of 'Why did you say's' and 'I didn't mean's.' I'll tell you,
Georgie: You know my tastes are pretty fairly simple--in the matter of
food, at least. Course, as you're always complaining, I do like decent
cigars--not those Flor de Cabagos you're smoking--"

"That's all right now! That's a good two-for. By the way, Paul, did I
tell you I decided to practically cut out smok--"

"Yes you--At the same time, if I can't get what I like, why, I can
do without it. I don't mind sitting down to burnt steak, with canned
peaches and store cake for a thrilling little dessert afterwards, but
I do draw the line at having to sympathize with Zilla because she's
so rotten bad-tempered that the cook has quit, and she's been so busy
sitting in a dirty lace negligee all afternoon, reading about some brave
manly Western hero, that she hasn't had time to do any cooking. You're
always talking about 'morals'--meaning monogamy, I suppose. You've been
the rock of ages to me, all right, but you're essentially a simp. You--"

"Where d' you get that 'simp,' little man? Let me tell you--"

"--love to look earnest and inform the world that it's the 'duty of
responsible business men to be strictly moral, as an example to the
community.' In fact you're so earnest about morality, old Georgie, that
I hate to think how essentially immoral you must be underneath. All
right, you can--"

"Wait, wait now! What's--"

"--talk about morals all you want to, old thing, but believe me, if
it hadn't been for you and an occasional evening playing the violin to
Terrill O'Farrell's 'cello, and three or four darling girls that let me
forget this beastly joke they call 'respectable life,' I'd 've killed
myself years ago.

"And business! The roofing business! Roofs for cowsheds! Oh, I don't
mean I haven't had a lot of fun out of the Game; out of putting it over
on the labor unions, and seeing a big check coming in, and the business
increasing. But what's the use of it? You know, my business isn't
distributing roofing--it's principally keeping my competitors from
distributing roofing. Same with you. All we do is cut each other's
throats and make the public pay for it!"

"Look here now, Paul! You're pretty darn near talking socialism!"

"Oh yes, of course I don't really exactly mean that--I s'pose.
Course--competition--brings out the best--survival of the
fittest--but--But I mean: Take all these fellows we know, the kind
right here in the club now, that seem to be perfectly content with their
home-life and their businesses, and that boost Zenith and the Chamber
of Commerce and holler for a million population. I bet if you could
cut into their heads you'd find that one-third of 'em are sure-enough
satisfied with their wives and kids and friends and their offices; and
one-third feel kind of restless but won't admit it; and one-third are
miserable and know it. They hate the whole peppy, boosting, go-ahead
game, and they're bored by their wives and think their families are
fools--at least when they come to forty or forty-five they're bored--and
they hate business, and they'd go--Why do you suppose there's so many
'mysterious' suicides? Why do you suppose so many Substantial Citizens
jumped right into the war? Think it was all patriotism?"

Babbitt snorted, "What do you expect? Think we were sent into the world
to have a soft time and--what is it?--'float on flowery beds of ease'?
Think Man was just made to be happy?"

"Why not? Though I've never discovered anybody that knew what the deuce
Man really was made for!"

"Well we know--not just in the Bible alone, but it stands to reason--a
man who doesn't buckle down and do his duty, even if it does bore him
sometimes, is nothing but a--well, he's simply a weakling. Mollycoddle,
in fact! And what do you advocate? Come down to cases! If a man is bored
by his wife, do you seriously mean he has a right to chuck her and take
a sneak, or even kill himself?"

"Good Lord, I don't know what 'rights' a man has! And I don't know the
solution of boredom. If I did, I'd be the one philosopher that had the
cure for living. But I do know that about ten times as many people find
their lives dull, and unnecessarily dull, as ever admit it; and I do
believe that if we busted out and admitted it sometimes, instead of
being nice and patient and loyal for sixty years, and then nice and
patient and dead for the rest of eternity, why, maybe, possibly, we
might make life more fun."

They drifted into a maze of speculation. Babbitt was elephantishly
uneasy. Paul was bold, but not quite sure about what he was being bold.
Now and then Babbitt suddenly agreed with Paul in an admission which
contradicted all his defense of duty and Christian patience, and at each
admission he had a curious reckless joy. He said at last:

"Look here, old Paul, you do a lot of talking about kicking things in
the face, but you never kick. Why don't you?"

"Nobody does. Habit too strong. But--Georgie, I've been thinking of one
mild bat--oh, don't worry, old pillar of monogamy; it's highly proper.
It seems to be settled now, isn't it--though of course Zilla keeps
rooting for a nice expensive vacation in New York and Atlantic City,
with the bright lights and the bootlegged cocktails and a bunch of
lounge-lizards to dance with--but the Babbitts and the Rieslings are
sure-enough going to Lake Sunasquam, aren't we? Why couldn't you and I
make some excuse--say business in New York--and get up to Maine four or
five days before they do, and just loaf by ourselves and smoke and cuss
and be natural?"

"Great! Great idea!" Babbitt admired.

Not for fourteen years had he taken a holiday without his wife, and
neither of them quite believed they could commit this audacity. Many
members of the Athletic Club did go camping without their wives, but
they were officially dedicated to fishing and hunting, whereas the
sacred and unchangeable sports of Babbitt and Paul Riesling were
golfing, motoring, and bridge. For either the fishermen or the golfers
to have changed their habits would have been an infraction of their
self-imposed discipline which would have shocked all right-thinking and
regularized citizens.

Babbitt blustered, "Why don't we just put our foot down and say, 'We're
going on ahead of you, and that's all there is to it!' Nothing criminal
in it. Simply say to Zilla--"

"You don't say anything to Zilla simply. Why, Georgie, she's almost as
much of a moralist as you are, and if I told her the truth she'd believe
we were going to meet some dames in New York. And even Myra--she never
nags you, the way Zilla does, but she'd worry. She'd say, 'Don't you
WANT me to go to Maine with you? I shouldn't dream of going unless you
wanted me;' and you'd give in to save her feelings. Oh, the devil! Let's
have a shot at duck-pins."

During the game of duck-pins, a juvenile form of bowling, Paul was
silent. As they came down the steps of the club, not more than half an
hour after the time at which Babbitt had sternly told Miss McGoun he
would be back, Paul sighed, "Look here, old man, oughtn't to talked
about Zilla way I did."

"Rats, old man, it lets off steam."

"Oh, I know! After spending all noon sneering at the conventional stuff,
I'm conventional enough to be ashamed of saving my life by busting out
with my fool troubles!"

"Old Paul, your nerves are kind of on the bum. I'm going to take you
away. I'm going to rig this thing. I'm going to have an important deal
in New York and--and sure, of course!--I'll need you to advise me on the
roof of the building! And the ole deal will fall through, and there'll
be nothing for us but to go on ahead to Maine. I--Paul, when it comes
right down to it, I don't care whether you bust loose or not. I do like
having a rep for being one of the Bunch, but if you ever needed me
I'd chuck it and come out for you every time! Not of course but what
you're--course I don't mean you'd ever do anything that would put--that
would put a decent position on the fritz but--See how I mean? I'm kind
of a clumsy old codger, and I need your fine Eyetalian hand. We--Oh,
hell, I can't stand here gassing all day! On the job! S' long! Don't
take any wooden money, Paulibus! See you soon! S' long!"





I

HE forgot Paul Riesling in an afternoon of not unagreeable details.
After a return to his office, which seemed to have staggered on without
him, he drove a "prospect" out to view a four-flat tenement in the
Linton district. He was inspired by the customer's admiration of the new
cigar-lighter. Thrice its novelty made him use it, and thrice he hurled
half-smoked cigarettes from the car, protesting, "I GOT to quit smoking
so blame much!"

Their ample discussion of every detail of the cigar-lighter led them
to speak of electric flat-irons and bed-warmers. Babbitt apologized for
being so shabbily old-fashioned as still to use a hot-water bottle, and
he announced that he would have the sleeping-porch wired at once. He had
enormous and poetic admiration, though very little understanding, of all
mechanical devices. They were his symbols of truth and beauty. Regarding
each new intricate mechanism--metal lathe, two-jet carburetor, machine
gun, oxyacetylene welder--he learned one good realistic-sounding phrase,
and used it over and over, with a delightful feeling of being technical
and initiated.

The customer joined him in the worship of machinery, and they came
buoyantly up to the tenement and began that examination of plastic slate
roof, kalamein doors, and seven-eighths-inch blind-nailed flooring,
began those diplomacies of hurt surprise and readiness to be persuaded
to do something they had already decided to do, which would some day
result in a sale.

On the way back Babbitt picked up his partner and father-in-law, Henry
T. Thompson, at his kitchen-cabinet works, and they drove through South
Zenith, a high-colored, banging, exciting region: new factories of
hollow tile with gigantic wire-glass windows, surly old red-brick
factories stained with tar, high-perched water-tanks, big red trucks
like locomotives, and, on a score of hectic side-tracks, far-wandering
freight-cars from the New York Central and apple orchards, the Great
Northern and wheat-plateaus, the Southern Pacific and orange groves.

They talked to the secretary of the Zenith Foundry Company about
an interesting artistic project--a cast-iron fence for Linden Lane
Cemetery. They drove on to the Zeeco Motor Company and interviewed
the sales-manager, Noel Ryland, about a discount on a Zeeco car for
Thompson. Babbitt and Ryland were fellow-members of the Boosters' Club,
and no Booster felt right if he bought anything from another Booster
without receiving a discount. But Henry Thompson growled, "Oh, t' hell
with 'em! I'm not going to crawl around mooching discounts, not
from nobody." It was one of the differences between Thompson, the
old-fashioned, lean Yankee, rugged, traditional, stage type of
American business man, and Babbitt, the plump, smooth, efficient,
up-to-the-minute and otherwise perfected modern. Whenever Thompson
twanged, "Put your John Hancock on that line," Babbitt was as much
amused by the antiquated provincialism as any proper Englishman by any
American. He knew himself to be of a breeding altogether more esthetic
and sensitive than Thompson's. He was a college graduate, he played
golf, he often smoked cigarettes instead of cigars, and when he went
to Chicago he took a room with a private bath. "The whole thing is," he
explained to Paul Riesling, "these old codgers lack the subtlety that
you got to have to-day."

This advance in civilization could be carried too far, Babbitt
perceived. Noel Ryland, sales-manager of the Zeeco, was a frivolous
graduate of Princeton, while Babbitt was a sound and standard ware from
that great department-store, the State University. Ryland wore spats,
he wrote long letters about City Planning and Community Singing, and,
though he was a Booster, he was known to carry in his pocket small
volumes of poetry in a foreign language. All this was going too far.
Henry Thompson was the extreme of insularity, and Noel Ryland the
extreme of frothiness, while between them, supporting the state,
defending the evangelical churches and domestic brightness and sound
business, were Babbitt and his friends.

With this just estimate of himself--and with the promise of a discount
on Thompson's car--he returned to his office in triumph.

But as he went through the corridor of the Reeves Building he sighed,
"Poor old Paul! I got to--Oh, damn Noel Ryland! Damn Charley McKelvey!
Just because they make more money than I do, they think they're so
superior. I wouldn't be found dead in their stuffy old Union Club!
I--Somehow, to-day, I don't feel like going back to work. Oh well--"


II

He answered telephone calls, he read the four o'clock mail, he signed
his morning's letters, he talked to a tenant about repairs, he fought
with Stanley Graff.

Young Graff, the outside salesman, was always hinting that he deserved
an increase of commission, and to-day he complained, "I think I ought
to get a bonus if I put through the Heiler sale. I'm chasing around and
working on it every single evening, almost."

Babbitt frequently remarked to his wife that it was better to "con your
office-help along and keep 'em happy 'stead of jumping on 'em and poking
'em up--get more work out of 'em that way," but this unexampled lack of
appreciation hurt him, and he turned on Graff:

"Look here, Stan; let's get this clear. You've got an idea somehow that
it's you that do all the selling. Where d' you get that stuff? Where
d' you think you'd be if it wasn't for our capital behind you, and our
lists of properties, and all the prospects we find for you? All you got
to do is follow up our tips and close the deal. The hall-porter could
sell Babbitt-Thompson listings! You say you're engaged to a girl, but
have to put in your evenings chasing after buyers. Well, why the devil
shouldn't you? What do you want to do? Sit around holding her hand? Let
me tell you, Stan, if your girl is worth her salt, she'll be glad to
know you're out hustling, making some money to furnish the home-nest,
instead of doing the lovey-dovey. The kind of fellow that kicks about
working overtime, that wants to spend his evenings reading trashy novels
or spooning and exchanging a lot of nonsense and foolishness with some
girl, he ain't the kind of upstanding, energetic young man, with a
future--and with Vision!--that we want here. How about it? What's your
Ideal, anyway? Do you want to make money and be a responsible member
of the community, or do you want to be a loafer, with no Inspiration or
Pep?"

Graff was not so amenable to Vision and Ideals as usual. "You bet I
want to make money! That's why I want that bonus! Honest, Mr. Babbitt,
I don't want to get fresh, but this Heiler house is a terror. Nobody'll
fall for it. The flooring is rotten and the walls are full of cracks."

"That's exactly what I mean! To a salesman with a love for his
profession, it's hard problems like that that inspire him to do his
best. Besides, Stan--Matter o' fact, Thompson and I are against bonuses,
as a matter of principle. We like you, and we want to help you so you
can get married, but we can't be unfair to the others on the staff.
If we start giving you bonuses, don't you see we're going to hurt
the feeling and be unjust to Penniman and Laylock? Right's right, and
discrimination is unfair, and there ain't going to be any of it in this
office! Don't get the idea, Stan, that because during the war salesmen
were hard to hire, now, when there's a lot of men out of work, there
aren't a slew of bright young fellows that would be glad to step in
and enjoy your opportunities, and not act as if Thompson and I were his
enemies and not do any work except for bonuses. How about it, heh? How
about it?"

"Oh--well--gee--of course--" sighed Graff, as he went out, crabwise.

Babbitt did not often squabble with his employees. He liked to like the
people about him; he was dismayed when they did not like him. It was
only when they attacked the sacred purse that he was frightened into
fury, but then, being a man given to oratory and high principles,
he enjoyed the sound of his own vocabulary and the warmth of his own
virtue. Today he had so passionately indulged in self-approval that he
wondered whether he had been entirely just:

"After all, Stan isn't a boy any more. Oughtn't to call him so hard. But
rats, got to haul folks over the coals now and then for their own good.
Unpleasant duty, but--I wonder if Stan is sore? What's he saying to
McGoun out there?"

So chill a wind of hatred blew from the outer office that the normal
comfort of his evening home-going was ruined. He was distressed by
losing that approval of his employees to which an executive is always
slave. Ordinarily he left the office with a thousand enjoyable fussy
directions to the effect that there would undoubtedly be important tasks
to-morrow, and Miss McGoun and Miss Bannigan would do well to be there
early, and for heaven's sake remind him to call up Conrad Lyte soon 's
he came in. To-night he departed with feigned and apologetic liveliness.
He was as afraid of his still-faced clerks--of the eyes focused on him,
Miss McGoun staring with head lifted from her typing, Miss Bannigan
looking over her ledger, Mat Penniman craning around at his desk in the
dark alcove, Stanley Graff sullenly expressionless--as a parvenu before
the bleak propriety of his butler. He hated to expose his back to their
laughter, and in his effort to be casually merry he stammered and was
raucously friendly and oozed wretchedly out of the door.

But he forgot his misery when he saw from Smith Street the charms of
Floral Heights; the roofs of red tile and green slate, the shining new
sun-parlors, and the stainless walls.


III

He stopped to inform Howard Littlefield, his scholarly neighbor, that
though the day had been springlike the evening might be cold. He went in
to shout "Where are you?" at his wife, with no very definite desire to
know where she was. He examined the lawn to see whether the furnace-man
had raked it properly. With some satisfaction and a good deal of
discussion of the matter with Mrs. Babbitt, Ted, and Howard Littlefield,
he concluded that the furnace-man had not raked it properly. He cut two
tufts of wild grass with his wife's largest dressmaking-scissors; he
informed Ted that it was all nonsense having a furnace-man--"big
husky fellow like you ought to do all the work around the house;" and
privately he meditated that it was agreeable to have it known throughout
the neighborhood that he was so prosperous that his son never worked
around the house.

He stood on the sleeping-porch and did his day's exercises: arms out
sidewise for two minutes, up for two minutes, while he muttered, "Ought
take more exercise; keep in shape;" then went in to see whether his
collar needed changing before dinner. As usual it apparently did not.

The Lettish-Croat maid, a powerful woman, beat the dinner-gong.


The roast of beef, roasted potatoes, and string beans were excellent
this evening and, after an adequate sketch of the day's progressive
weather-states, his four-hundred-and-fifty-dollar fee, his lunch with
Paul Riesling, and the proven merits of the new cigar-lighter, he was
moved to a benign, "Sort o' thinking about buyin, a new car. Don't
believe we'll get one till next year, but still we might."

Verona, the older daughter, cried, "Oh, Dad, if you do, why don't you
get a sedan? That would be perfectly slick! A closed car is so much more
comfy than an open one."

"Well now, I don't know about that. I kind of like an open car. You get
more fresh air that way."

"Oh, shoot, that's just because you never tried a sedan. Let's get one.
It's got a lot more class," said Ted.

"A closed car does keep the clothes nicer," from Mrs. Babbitt; "You
don't get your hair blown all to pieces," from Verona; "It's a lot
sportier," from Ted; and from Tinka, the youngest, "Oh, let's have a
sedan! Mary Ellen's father has got one." Ted wound up, "Oh, everybody's
got a closed car now, except us!"

Babbitt faced them: "I guess you got nothing very terrible to complain
about! Anyway, I don't keep a car just to enable you children to look
like millionaires! And I like an open car, so you can put the top down
on summer evenings and go out for a drive and get some good fresh air.
Besides--A closed car costs more money."

"Aw, gee whiz, if the Doppelbraus can afford a closed car, I guess we
can!" prodded Ted.

"Humph! I make eight thousand a year to his seven! But I don't blow it
all in and waste it and throw it around, the way he does! Don't believe
in this business of going and spending a whole lot of money to show off
and--"

They went, with ardor and some thoroughness, into the matters of
streamline bodies, hill-climbing power, wire wheels, chrome steel,
ignition systems, and body colors. It was much more than a study of
transportation. It was an aspiration for knightly rank. In the city of
Zenith, in the barbarous twentieth century, a family's motor indicated
its social rank as precisely as the grades of the peerage determined
the rank of an English family--indeed, more precisely, considering the
opinion of old county families upon newly created brewery barons and
woolen-mill viscounts. The details of precedence were never officially
determined. There was no court to decide whether the second son of a
Pierce Arrow limousine should go in to dinner before the first son of a
Buick roadster, but of their respective social importance there was no
doubt; and where Babbitt as a boy had aspired to the presidency, his
son Ted aspired to a Packard twin-six and an established position in the
motored gentry.

The favor which Babbitt had won from his family by speaking of a new car
evaporated as they realized that he didn't intend to buy one this year.
Ted lamented, "Oh, punk! The old boat looks as if it'd had fleas and
been scratching its varnish off." Mrs. Babbitt said abstractedly,
"Snoway talkcher father." Babbitt raged, "If you're too much of a
high-class gentleman, and you belong to the bon ton and so on, why, you
needn't take the car out this evening." Ted explained, "I didn't mean--"
and dinner dragged on with normal domestic delight to the inevitable
point at which Babbitt protested, "Come, come now, we can't sit here all
evening. Give the girl a chance to clear away the table."

He was fretting, "What a family! I don't know how we all get to
scrapping this way. Like to go off some place and be able to hear myself
think.... Paul ... Maine ... Wear old pants, and loaf, and cuss." He
said cautiously to his wife, "I've been in correspondence with a man in
New York--wants me to see him about a real-estate trade--may not come
off till summer. Hope it doesn't break just when we and the Rieslings
get ready to go to Maine. Be a shame if we couldn't make the trip there
together. Well, no use worrying now."

Verona escaped, immediately after dinner, with no discussion save an
automatic "Why don't you ever stay home?" from Babbitt.

In the living-room, in a corner of the davenport, Ted settled down to
his Home Study; plain geometry, Cicero, and the agonizing metaphors of
Comus.

"I don't see why they give us this old-fashioned junk by Milton and
Shakespeare and Wordsworth and all these has-beens," he protested. "Oh,
I guess I could stand it to see a show by Shakespeare, if they had swell
scenery and put on a lot of dog, but to sit down in cold blood and READ
'em--These teachers--how do they get that way?"

Mrs. Babbitt, darning socks, speculated, "Yes, I wonder why. Of course I
don't want to fly in the face of the professors and everybody, but I do
think there's things in Shakespeare--not that I read him much, but when
I was young the girls used to show me passages that weren't, really,
they weren't at all nice."

Babbitt looked up irritably from the comic strips in the Evening
Advocate. They composed his favorite literature and art, these
illustrated chronicles in which Mr. Mutt hit Mr. Jeff with a rotten egg,
and Mother corrected Father's vulgarisms by means of a rolling-pin. With
the solemn face of a devotee, breathing heavily through his open
mouth, he plodded nightly through every picture, and during the rite
he detested interruptions. Furthermore, he felt that on the subject of
Shakespeare he wasn't really an authority. Neither the Advocate-Times,
the Evening Advocate, nor the Bulletin of the Zenith Chamber of Commerce
had ever had an editorial on the matter, and until one of them had
spoken he found it hard to form an original opinion. But even at risk
of floundering in strange bogs, he could not keep out of an open
controversy.

"I'll tell you why you have to study Shakespeare and those. It's because
they're required for college entrance, and that's all there is to it!
Personally, I don't see myself why they stuck 'em into an up-to-date
high-school system like we have in this state. Be a good deal better if
you took Business English, and learned how to write an ad, or letters
that would pull. But there it is, and there's no talk, argument, or
discussion about it! Trouble with you, Ted, is you always want to do
something different! If you're going to law-school--and you are!--I
never had a chance to, but I'll see that you do--why, you'll want to lay
in all the English and Latin you can get."

"Oh punk. I don't see what's the use of law-school--or even finishing
high school. I don't want to go to college 'specially. Honest, there's
lot of fellows that have graduated from colleges that don't begin
to make as much money as fellows that went to work early. Old Shimmy
Peters, that teaches Latin in the High, he's a what-is-it from Columbia
and he sits up all night reading a lot of greasy books and he's always
spieling about the 'value of languages,' and the poor soak doesn't make
but eighteen hundred a year, and no traveling salesman would think of
working for that. I know what I'd like to do. I'd like to be an aviator,
or own a corking big garage, or else--a fellow was telling me about it
yesterday--I'd like to be one of these fellows that the Standard Oil
Company sends out to China, and you live in a compound and don't have to
do any work, and you get to see the world and pagodas and the ocean and
everything! And then I could take up correspondence-courses. That's
the real stuff! You don't have to recite to some frosty-faced old
dame that's trying to show off to the principal, and you can study any
subject you want to. Just listen to these! I clipped out the ads of some
swell courses."

He snatched from the back of his geometry half a hundred advertisements
of those home-study courses which the energy and foresight of American
commerce have contributed to the science of education. The first
displayed the portrait of a young man with a pure brow, an iron jaw,
silk socks, and hair like patent leather. Standing with one hand in his
trousers-pocket and the other extended with chiding forefinger, he was
bewitching an audience of men with gray beards, paunches, bald heads,
and every other sign of wisdom and prosperity. Above the picture was
an inspiring educational symbol--no antiquated lamp or torch or owl of
Minerva, but a row of dollar signs. The text ran:

     $   $   $   $   $   $   $   $   $
     POWER AND PROSPERITY IN PUBLIC SPEAKING

     A Yarn Told at the Club

Who do you think I ran into the other evening at the De Luxe Restaurant?
Why, old Freddy Durkee, that used to be a dead or-alive shipping clerk
in my old place--Mr. Mouse-Man we used to laughingly call the dear
fellow. One time he was so timid he was plumb scared of the Super, and
never got credit for the dandy work he did. Him at the De Luxe! And if
he wasn't ordering a tony feed with all the "fixings" from celery to
nuts! And instead of being embarrassed by the waiters, like he used to
be at the little dump where we lunched in Old Lang Syne, he was bossing
them around like he was a millionaire!

I cautiously asked him what he was doing. Freddy laughed and said, "Say,
old chum, I guess you're wondering what's come over me. You'll be glad
to know I'm now Assistant Super at the old shop, and right on the High
Road to Prosperity and Domination, and I look forward with confidence
to a twelve-cylinder car, and the wife is making things hum in the best
society and the kiddies getting a first-class education."

------------------------ WHAT WE TEACH YOU

How to address your lodge.

How to give toasts.

How to tell dialect stories.

How to propose to a lady.

How to entertain banquets.

How to make convincing selling-talks.

How to build big vocabulary.

How to create a strong personality.

How to become a rational, powerful and original thinker.

How to be a MASTER MAN!

--------------------------------
------------------------ PROF. W. F. PEET

author of the Shortcut Course in Public-Speaking, is easily the foremost
figure in practical literature, psychology & oratory. A graduate of some
of our leading universities, lecturer, extensive traveler, author of
books, poetry, etc., a man with the unique PERSONALITY OF THE MASTER
MINDS, he is ready to give YOU all the secrets of his culture and
hammering Force, in a few easy lessons that will not interfere with
other occupations. --------------------------------

"Here's how it happened. I ran across an ad of a course that claimed
to teach people how to talk easily and on their feet, how to answer
complaints, how to lay a proposition before the Boss, how to hit a
bank for a loan, how to hold a big audience spellbound with wit, humor,
anecdote, inspiration, etc. It was compiled by the Master Orator, Prof.
Waldo F. Peet. I was skeptical, too, but I wrote (JUST ON A POSTCARD,
with name and address) to the publisher for the lessons--sent On Trial,
money back if you are not absolutely satisfied. There were eight simple
lessons in plain language anybody could understand, and I studied them
just a few hours a night, then started practising on the wife. Soon
found I could talk right up to the Super and get due credit for all the
good work I did. They began to appreciate me and advance me fast, and
say, old doggo, what do you think they're paying me now? $6,500 per
year! And say, I find I can keep a big audience fascinated, speaking on
any topic. As a friend, old boy, I advise you to send for circular (no
obligation) and valuable free Art Picture to:--

     SHORTCUT EDUCATIONAL PUB. CO.
     Desk WA        Sandpit, Iowa.

     ARE YOU A 100 PERCENTER OR A 10 PERCENTER?"

Babbitt was again without a canon which would enable him to speak with
authority. Nothing in motoring or real estate had indicated what a Solid
Citizen and Regular Fellow ought to think about culture by mail. He
began with hesitation:

"Well--sounds as if it covered the ground. It certainly is a fine thing
to be able to orate. I've sometimes thought I had a little talent that
way myself, and I know darn well that one reason why a fourflushing old
back-number like Chan Mott can get away with it in real estate is just
because he can make a good talk, even when he hasn't got a doggone thing
to say! And it certainly is pretty cute the way they get out all these
courses on various topics and subjects nowadays. I'll tell you, though:
No need to blow in a lot of good money on this stuff when you can get
a first-rate course in eloquence and English and all that right in
your own school--and one of the biggest school buildings in the entire
country!"

"That's so," said Mrs. Babbitt comfortably, while Ted complained:

"Yuh, but Dad, they just teach a lot of old junk that isn't any
practical use--except the manual training and typewriting and basketball
and dancing--and in these correspondence-courses, gee, you can get all
kinds of stuff that would come in handy. Say, listen to this one:

'CAN YOU PLAY A MAN'S PART?

'If you are walking with your mother, sister or best girl and some
one passes a slighting remark or uses improper language, won't you be
ashamed if you can't take her part? Well, can you?

'We teach boxing and self-defense by mail. Many pupils have written
saying that after a few lessons they've outboxed bigger and heavier
opponents. The lessons start with simple movements practised before your
mirror--holding out your hand for a coin, the breast-stroke in swimming,
etc. Before you realize it you are striking scientifically, ducking,
guarding and feinting, just as if you had a real opponent before you.'"


"Oh, baby, maybe I wouldn't like that!" Ted chanted. "I'll tell the
world! Gosh, I'd like to take one fellow I know in school that's always
shooting off his mouth, and catch him alone--"

"Nonsense! The idea! Most useless thing I ever heard of!" Babbitt
fulminated.

"Well, just suppose I was walking with Mama or Rone, and somebody passed
a slighting remark or used improper language. What would I do?"

"Why, you'd probably bust the record for the hundred-yard dash!"

"I WOULD not! I'd stand right up to any mucker that passed a slighting
remark on MY sister and I'd show him--"

"Look here, young Dempsey! If I ever catch you fighting I'll whale the
everlasting daylights out of you--and I'll do it without practising
holding out my hand for a coin before the mirror, too!"

"Why, Ted dear," Mrs. Babbitt said placidly, "it's not at all nice, your
talking of fighting this way!"

"Well, gosh almighty, that's a fine way to appreciate--And then suppose
I was walking with YOU, Ma, and somebody passed a slighting remark--"

"Nobody's going to pass no slighting remarks on nobody," Babbitt
observed, "not if they stay home and study their geometry and mind
their own affairs instead of hanging around a lot of poolrooms and
soda-fountains and places where nobody's got any business to be!"

"But gooooooosh, Dad, if they DID!"

Mrs. Babbitt chirped, "Well, if they did, I wouldn't do them the honor
of paying any attention to them! Besides, they never do. You always hear
about these women that get followed and insulted and all, but I don't
believe a word of it, or it's their own fault, the way some women look
at a person. I certainly never 've been insulted by--"

"Aw shoot. Mother, just suppose you WERE sometime! Just SUPPOSE! Can't
you suppose something? Can't you imagine things?"

"Certainly I can imagine things! The idea!"

"Certainly your mother can imagine things--and suppose things! Think
you're the only member of this household that's got an imagination?"
Babbitt demanded. "But what's the use of a lot of supposing? Supposing
never gets you anywhere. No sense supposing when there's a lot of real
facts to take into considera--"

"Look here, Dad. Suppose--I mean, just--just suppose you were in your
office and some rival real-estate man--"

"Realtor!"

"--some realtor that you hated came in--"

"I don't hate any realtor."

"But suppose you DID!"

"I don't intend to suppose anything of the kind! There's plenty of
fellows in my profession that stoop and hate their competitors, but if
you were a little older and understood business, instead of always going
to the movies and running around with a lot of fool girls with their
dresses up to their knees and powdered and painted and rouged and God
knows what all as if they were chorus-girls, then you'd know--and
you'd suppose--that if there's any one thing that I stand for in the
real-estate circles of Zenith, it is that we ought to always speak
of each other only in the friendliest terms and institute a spirit of
brotherhood and cooperation, and so I certainly can't suppose and I
can't imagine my hating any realtor, not even that dirty, fourflushing
society sneak, Cecil Rountree!"

"But--"

"And there's no If, And or But about it! But if I WERE going to lambaste
somebody, I wouldn't require any fancy ducks or swimming-strokes before
a mirror, or any of these doodads and flipflops! Suppose you were out
some place and a fellow called you vile names. Think you'd want to box
and jump around like a dancing-master? You'd just lay him out cold (at
least I certainly hope any son of mine would!) and then you'd dust off
your hands and go on about your business, and that's all there is to it,
and you aren't going to have any boxing-lessons by mail, either!"

"Well but--Yes--I just wanted to show how many different kinds of
correspondence-courses there are, instead of all the camembert they
teach us in the High."

"But I thought they taught boxing in the school gymnasium."

"That's different. They stick you up there and some big stiff amuses
himself pounding the stuffin's out of you before you have a chance to
learn. Hunka! Not any! But anyway--Listen to some of these others."

The advertisements were truly philanthropic. One of them bore the
rousing headline: "Money! Money!! Money!!!" The second announced that
"Mr. P. R., formerly making only eighteen a week in a barber shop,
writes to us that since taking our course he is now pulling down $5,000
as an Osteo-vitalic Physician;" and the third that "Miss J. L., recently
a wrapper in a store, is now getting Ten Real Dollars a day teaching our
Hindu System of Vibratory Breathing and Mental Control."

Ted had collected fifty or sixty announcements, from annual
reference-books, from Sunday School periodicals, fiction-magazines,
and journals of discussion. One benefactor implored, "Don't be a
Wallflower--Be More Popular and Make More Money--YOU Can Ukulele or Sing
Yourself into Society! By the secret principles of a Newly Discovered
System of Music Teaching, any one--man, lady or child--can, without
tiresome exercises, special training or long drawn out study, and
without waste of time, money or energy, learn to play by note,
piano, banjo, cornet, clarinet, saxophone, violin or drum, and learn
sight-singing."

The next, under the wistful appeal "Finger Print Detectives Wanted--Big
Incomes!" confided: "YOU red-blooded men and women--this is the
PROFESSION you have been looking for. There's MONEY in it, BIG money,
and that rapid change of scene, that entrancing and compelling interest
and fascination, which your active mind and adventurous spirit crave.
Think of being the chief figure and directing factor in solving strange
mysteries and baffling crimes. This wonderful profession brings you into
contact with influential men on the basis of equality, and often calls
upon you to travel everywhere, maybe to distant lands--all expenses
paid. NO SPECIAL EDUCATION REQUIRED."

"Oh, boy! I guess that wins the fire-brick necklace! Wouldn't it be
swell to travel everywhere and nab some famous crook!" whooped Ted.

"Well, I don't think much of that. Doggone likely to get hurt. Still,
that music-study stunt might be pretty fair, though. There's no reason
why, if efficiency-experts put their minds to it the way they have to
routing products in a factory, they couldn't figure out some scheme so
a person wouldn't have to monkey with all this practising and exercises
that you get in music." Babbitt was impressed, and he had a delightful
parental feeling that they two, the men of the family, understood each
other.

He listened to the notices of mail-box universities which taught
Short-story Writing and Improving the Memory, Motion-picture-acting
and Developing the Soul-power, Banking and Spanish, Chiropody and
Photography, Electrical Engineering and Window-trimming, Poultry-raising
and Chemistry.

"Well--well--" Babbitt sought for adequate expression of his admiration.
"I'm a son of a gun! I knew this correspondence-school business had
become a mighty profitable game--makes suburban real-estate look
like two cents!--but I didn't realize it'd got to be such a reg'lar
key-industry! Must rank right up with groceries and movies. Always
figured somebody'd come along with the brains to not leave education to
a lot of bookworms and impractical theorists but make a big thing out of
it. Yes, I can see how a lot of these courses might interest you. I must
ask the fellows at the Athletic if they ever realized--But same time,
Ted, you know how advertisers, I means some advertisers, exaggerate. I
don't know as they'd be able to jam you through these courses as fast as
they claim they can."

"Oh sure, Dad; of course." Ted had the immense and joyful maturity of a
boy who is respectfully listened to by his elders. Babbitt concentrated
on him with grateful affection:

"I can see what an influence these courses might have on the whole
educational works. Course I'd never admit it publicly--fellow like
myself, a State U. graduate, it's only decent and patriotic for him to
blow his horn and boost the Alma Mater--but smatter of fact, there's
a whole lot of valuable time lost even at the U., studying poetry and
French and subjects that never brought in anybody a cent. I don't know
but what maybe these correspondence-courses might prove to be one of the
most important American inventions.

"Trouble with a lot of folks is: they're so blame material; they don't
see the spiritual and mental side of American supremacy; they think that
inventions like the telephone and the areoplane and wireless--no,
that was a Wop invention, but anyway: they think these mechanical
improvements are all that we stand for; whereas to a real thinker, he
sees that spiritual and, uh, dominating movements like Efficiency, and
Rotarianism, and Prohibition, and Democracy are what compose our deepest
and truest wealth. And maybe this new principle in education-at-home may
be another--may be another factor. I tell you, Ted, we've got to have
Vision--"

"I think those correspondence-courses are terrible!"

The philosophers gasped. It was Mrs. Babbitt who had made this discord
in their spiritual harmony, and one of Mrs. Babbitt's virtues was that,
except during dinner-parties, when she was transformed into a raging
hostess, she took care of the house and didn't bother the males by
thinking. She went on firmly:

"It sounds awful to me, the way they coax those poor young folks
to think they're learning something, and nobody 'round to help them
and--You two learn so quick, but me, I always was slow. But just the
same--"

Babbitt attended to her: "Nonsense! Get just as much, studying at
home. You don't think a fellow learns any more because he blows in his
father's hard-earned money and sits around in Morris chairs in a swell
Harvard dormitory with pictures and shields and table-covers and those
doodads, do you? I tell you, I'm a college man--I KNOW! There is one
objection you might make though. I certainly do protest against any
effort to get a lot of fellows out of barber shops and factories into
the professions. They're too crowded already, and what'll we do for
workmen if all those fellows go and get educated?"

Ted was leaning back, smoking a cigarette without reproof. He was, for
the moment, sharing the high thin air of Babbitt's speculation as though
he were Paul Riesling or even Dr. Howard Littlefield. He hinted:

"Well, what do you think then, Dad? Wouldn't it be a good idea if I
could go off to China or some peppy place, and study engineering or
something by mail?"

"No, and I'll tell you why, son. I've found out it's a mighty nice thing
to be able to say you're a B.A. Some client that doesn't know what you
are and thinks you're just a plug business man, he gets to shooting off
his mouth about economics or literature or foreign trade conditions, and
you just ease in something like, 'When I was in college--course I got
my B.A. in sociology and all that junk--' Oh, it puts an awful crimp in
their style! But there wouldn't be any class to saying 'I got the degree
of Stamp-licker from the Bezuzus Mail-order University!' You see--My
dad was a pretty good old coot, but he never had much style to him, and
I had to work darn hard to earn my way through college. Well, it's been
worth it, to be able to associate with the finest gentlemen in Zenith,
at the clubs and so on, and I wouldn't want you to drop out of the
gentlemen class--the class that are just as red-blooded as the Common
People but still have power and personality. It would kind of hurt me if
you did that, old man!"

"I know, Dad! Sure! All right. I'll stick to it. Say! Gosh! Gee whiz! I
forgot all about those kids I was going to take to the chorus rehearsal.
I'll have to duck!"

"But you haven't done all your home-work."

"Do it first thing in the morning."

"Well--"

Six times in the past sixty days Babbitt had stormed, "You will not 'do
it first thing in the morning'! You'll do it right now!" but to-night he
said, "Well, better hustle," and his smile was the rare shy radiance he
kept for Paul Riesling.


IV

"Ted's a good boy," he said to Mrs. Babbitt.

"Oh, he is!"

"Who's these girls he's going to pick up? Are they nice decent girls?"

"I don't know. Oh dear, Ted never tells me anything any more. I don't
understand what's come over the children of this generation. I used
to have to tell Papa and Mama everything, but seems like the children
to-day have just slipped away from all control."

"I hope they're decent girls. Course Ted's no longer a kid, and I
wouldn't want him to, uh, get mixed up and everything."

"George: I wonder if you oughtn't to take him aside and tell him
about--Things!" She blushed and lowered her eyes.

"Well, I don't know. Way I figure it, Myra, no sense suggesting a lot
of Things to a boy's mind. Think up enough devilment by himself. But
I wonder--It's kind of a hard question. Wonder what Littlefield thinks
about it?"

"Course Papa agrees with you. He says all this--Instruction is--He says
'tisn't decent."

"Oh, he does, does he! Well, let me tell you that whatever Henry T.
Thompson thinks--about morals, I mean, though course you can't beat the
old duffer--"

"Why, what a way to talk of Papa!"

"--simply can't beat him at getting in on the ground floor of a deal,
but let me tell you whenever he springs any ideas about higher things
and education, then I know I think just the opposite. You may not regard
me as any great brain-shark, but believe me, I'm a regular college
president, compared with Henry T.! Yes sir, by golly, I'm going to take
Ted aside and tell him why I lead a strictly moral life."

"Oh, will you? When?"

"When? When? What's the use of trying to pin me down to When and Why and
Where and How and When? That's the trouble with women, that's why they
don't make high-class executives; they haven't any sense of diplomacy.
When the proper opportunity and occasion arises so it just comes
in natural, why then I'll have a friendly little talk with him
and--and--Was that Tinka hollering up-stairs? She ought to been asleep,
long ago."

He prowled through the living-room, and stood in the sun-parlor, that
glass-walled room of wicker chairs and swinging couch in which they
loafed on Sunday afternoons. Outside only the lights of Doppelbrau's
house and the dim presence of Babbitt's favorite elm broke the softness
of April night.

"Good visit with the boy. Getting over feeling cranky, way I did this
morning. And restless. Though, by golly, I will have a few days alone
with Paul in Maine! . . . That devil Zilla! . . . But . . . Ted's all
right. Whole family all right. And good business. Not many fellows make
four hundred and fifty bucks, practically half of a thousand dollars
easy as I did to-day! Maybe when we all get to rowing it's just as much
my fault as it is theirs. Oughtn't to get grouchy like I do. But--Wish
I'd been a pioneer, same as my grand-dad. But then, wouldn't have a
house like this. I--Oh, gosh, I DON'T KNOW!"

He thought moodily of Paul Riesling, of their youth together, of the
girls they had known.

When Babbitt had graduated from the State University, twenty-four years
ago, he had intended to be a lawyer. He had been a ponderous debater in
college; he felt that he was an orator; he saw himself becoming governor
of the state. While he read law he worked as a real-estate salesman. He
saved money, lived in a boarding-house, supped on poached egg on hash.
The lively Paul Riesling (who was certainly going off to Europe to study
violin, next month or next year) was his refuge till Paul was bespelled
by Zilla Colbeck, who laughed and danced and drew men after her plump
and gaily wagging finger.

Babbitt's evenings were barren then, and he found comfort only in Paul's
second cousin, Myra Thompson, a sleek and gentle girl who showed her
capacity by agreeing with the ardent young Babbitt that of course he was
going to be governor some day. Where Zilla mocked him as a country boy,
Myra said indignantly that he was ever so much solider than the young
dandies who had been born in the great city of Zenith--an ancient
settlement in 1897, one hundred and five years old, with two hundred
thousand population, the queen and wonder of all the state and, to the
Catawba boy, George Babbitt, so vast and thunderous and luxurious that
he was flattered to know a girl ennobled by birth in Zenith.

Of love there was no talk between them. He knew that if he was to
study law he could not marry for years; and Myra was distinctly a Nice
Girl--one didn't kiss her, one didn't "think about her that way at all"
unless one was going to marry her. But she was a dependable companion.
She was always ready to go skating, walking; always content to hear his
discourses on the great things he was going to do, the distressed poor
whom he would defend against the Unjust Rich, the speeches he would
make at Banquets, the inexactitudes of popular thought which he would
correct.

One evening when he was weary and soft-minded, he saw that she had been
weeping. She had been left out of a party given by Zilla. Somehow her
head was on his shoulder and he was kissing away the tears--and she
raised her head to say trustingly, "Now that we're engaged, shall we be
married soon or shall we wait?"

Engaged? It was his first hint of it. His affection for this brown
tender woman thing went cold and fearful, but he could not hurt her,
could not abuse her trust. He mumbled something about waiting, and
escaped. He walked for an hour, trying to find a way of telling her that
it was a mistake. Often, in the month after, he got near to telling her,
but it was pleasant to have a girl in his arms, and less and less could
he insult her by blurting that he didn't love her. He himself had no
doubt. The evening before his marriage was an agony, and the morning
wild with the desire to flee.

She made him what is known as a Good Wife. She was loyal, industrious,
and at rare times merry. She passed from a feeble disgust at their
closer relations into what promised to be ardent affection, but it
drooped into bored routine. Yet she existed only for him and for the
children, and she was as sorry, as worried as himself, when he gave up
the law and trudged on in a rut of listing real estate.

"Poor kid, she hasn't had much better time than I have," Babbitt
reflected, standing in the dark sun-parlor. "But--I wish I could 've had
a whirl at law and politics. Seen what I could do. Well--Maybe I've made
more money as it is."

He returned to the living-room but before he settled down he smoothed
his wife's hair, and she glanced up, happy and somewhat surprised.





I

HE solemnly finished the last copy of the American Magazine, while his
wife sighed, laid away her darning, and looked enviously at the lingerie
designs in a women's magazine. The room was very still.

It was a room which observed the best Floral Heights standards. The gray
walls were divided into artificial paneling by strips of white-enameled
pine. From the Babbitts' former house had come two much-carved
rocking-chairs, but the other chairs were new, very deep and restful,
upholstered in blue and gold-striped velvet. A blue velvet davenport
faced the fireplace, and behind it was a cherrywood table and a tall
piano-lamp with a shade of golden silk. (Two out of every three houses
in Floral Heights had before the fireplace a davenport, a mahogany table
real or imitation, and a piano-lamp or a reading-lamp with a shade of
yellow or rose silk.)

On the table was a runner of gold-threaded Chinese fabric, four
magazines, a silver box containing cigarette-crumbs, and three
"gift-books"--large, expensive editions of fairy-tales illustrated by
English artists and as yet unread by any Babbitt save Tinka.

In a corner by the front windows was a large cabinet Victrola. (Eight
out of every nine Floral Heights houses had a cabinet phonograph.)

Among the pictures, hung in the exact center of each gray panel, were
a red and black imitation English hunting-print, an anemic imitation
boudoir-print with a French caption of whose morality Babbitt had always
been rather suspicious, and a "hand-colored" photograph of a Colonial
room--rag rug, maiden spinning, cat demure before a white fireplace.
(Nineteen out of every twenty houses in Floral Heights had either a
hunting-print, a Madame Feit la Toilette print, a colored photograph of
a New England house, a photograph of a Rocky Mountain, or all four.)

It was a room as superior in comfort to the "parlor" of Babbitt's
boyhood as his motor was superior to his father's buggy. Though there
was nothing in the room that was interesting, there was nothing that
was offensive. It was as neat, and as negative, as a block of artificial
ice. The fireplace was unsoftened by downy ashes or by sooty brick; the
brass fire-irons were of immaculate polish; and the grenadier andirons
were like samples in a shop, desolate, unwanted, lifeless things of
commerce.

Against the wall was a piano, with another piano-lamp, but no one used
it save Tinka. The hard briskness of the phonograph contented them;
their store of jazz records made them feel wealthy and cultured; and all
they knew of creating music was the nice adjustment of a bamboo needle.
The books on the table were unspotted and laid in rigid parallels;
not one corner of the carpet-rug was curled; and nowhere was there
a hockey-stick, a torn picture-book, an old cap, or a gregarious and
disorganizing dog.


II

At home, Babbitt never read with absorption. He was concentrated enough
at the office but here he crossed his legs and fidgeted. When his story
was interesting he read the best, that is the funniest, paragraphs to
his wife; when it did not hold him he coughed, scratched his ankles and
his right ear, thrust his left thumb into his vest pocket, jingled his
silver, whirled the cigar-cutter and the keys on one end of his watch
chain, yawned, rubbed his nose, and found errands to do. He went
upstairs to put on his slippers--his elegant slippers of seal-brown,
shaped like medieval shoes. He brought up an apple from the barrel which
stood by the trunk-closet in the basement.

"An apple a day keeps the doctor away," he enlightened Mrs. Babbitt, for
quite the first time in fourteen hours.

"That's so."

"An apple is Nature's best regulator."

"Yes, it--"

"Trouble with women is, they never have sense enough to form regular
habits."

"Well, I--"

"Always nibbling and eating between meals."

"George!" She looked up from her reading. "Did you have a light lunch
to-day, like you were going to? I did!"

This malicious and unprovoked attack astounded him. "Well, maybe it
wasn't as light as--Went to lunch with Paul and didn't have much chance
to diet. Oh, you needn't to grin like a chessy cat! If it wasn't for me
watching out and keeping an eye on our diet--I'm the only member of this
family that appreciates the value of oatmeal for breakfast. I--"

She stooped over her story while he piously sliced and gulped down the
apple, discoursing:

"One thing I've done: cut down my smoking.

"Had kind of a run-in with Graff in the office. He's getting too darn
fresh. I'll stand for a good deal, but once in a while I got to assert
my authority, and I jumped him. 'Stan,' I said--Well, I told him just
exactly where he got off.

"Funny kind of a day. Makes you feel restless.

"Wellllllllll, uh--" That sleepiest sound in the world, the terminal
yawn. Mrs. Babbitt yawned with it, and looked grateful as he droned,
"How about going to bed, eh? Don't suppose Rone and Ted will be in till
all hours. Yep, funny kind of a day; not terribly warm but yet--Gosh,
I'd like--Some day I'm going to take a long motor trip."

"Yes, we'd enjoy that," she yawned.

He looked away from her as he realized that he did not wish to have
her go with him. As he locked doors and tried windows and set the heat
regulator so that the furnace-drafts would open automatically in the
morning, he sighed a little, heavy with a lonely feeling which perplexed
and frightened him. So absent-minded was he that he could not remember
which window-catches he had inspected, and through the darkness,
fumbling at unseen perilous chairs, he crept back to try them all over
again. His feet were loud on the steps as he clumped upstairs at the end
of this great and treacherous day of veiled rebellions.


III

Before breakfast he always reverted to up-state village boyhood, and
shrank from the complex urban demands of shaving, bathing, deciding
whether the current shirt was clean enough for another day. Whenever he
stayed home in the evening he went to bed early, and thriftily got
ahead in those dismal duties. It was his luxurious custom to shave while
sitting snugly in a tubful of hot water. He may be viewed to-night as a
plump, smooth, pink, baldish, podgy goodman, robbed of the importance of
spectacles, squatting in breast-high water, scraping his lather-smeared
cheeks with a safety-razor like a tiny lawn-mower, and with melancholy
dignity clawing through the water to recover a slippery and active piece
of soap.

He was lulled to dreaming by the caressing warmth. The light fell on the
inner surface of the tub in a pattern of delicate wrinkled lines which
slipped with a green sparkle over the curving porcelain as the clear
water trembled. Babbitt lazily watched it; noted that along the
silhouette of his legs against the radiance on the bottom of the tub,
the shadows of the air-bubbles clinging to the hairs were reproduced
as strange jungle mosses. He patted the water, and the reflected light
capsized and leaped and volleyed. He was content and childish. He
played. He shaved a swath down the calf of one plump leg.

The drain-pipe was dripping, a dulcet and lively song: drippety drip
drip dribble, drippety drip drip drip. He was enchanted by it. He looked
at the solid tub, the beautiful nickel taps, the tiled walls of the
room, and felt virtuous in the possession of this splendor.

He roused himself and spoke gruffly to his bath-things. "Come here!
You've done enough fooling!" he reproved the treacherous soap, and
defied the scratchy nail-brush with "Oh, you would, would you!" He
soaped himself, and rinsed himself, and austerely rubbed himself; he
noted a hole in the Turkish towel, and meditatively thrust a finger
through it, and marched back to the bedroom, a grave and unbending
citizen.

There was a moment of gorgeous abandon, a flash of melodrama such as he
found in traffic-driving, when he laid out a clean collar, discovered
that it was frayed in front, and tore it up with a magnificent yeeeeeing
sound.

Most important of all was the preparation of his bed and the
sleeping-porch.

It is not known whether he enjoyed his sleeping-porch because of the
fresh air or because it was the standard thing to have a sleeping-porch.

Just as he was an Elk, a Booster, and a member of the Chamber of
Commerce, just as the priests of the Presbyterian Church determined his
every religious belief and the senators who controlled the Republican
Party decided in little smoky rooms in Washington what he should think
about disarmament, tariff, and Germany, so did the large national
advertisers fix the surface of his life, fix what he believed to be
his individuality. These standard advertised wares--toothpastes, socks,
tires, cameras, instantaneous hot-water heaters--were his symbols and
proofs of excellence; at first the signs, then the substitutes, for joy
and passion and wisdom.

But none of these advertised tokens of financial and social success was
more significant than a sleeping-porch with a sun-parlor below.

The rites of preparing for bed were elaborate and unchanging. The
blankets had to be tucked in at the foot of his cot. (Also, the reason
why the maid hadn't tucked in the blankets had to be discussed with Mrs.
Babbitt.) The rag rug was adjusted so that his bare feet would strike it
when he arose in the morning. The alarm clock was wound. The hot-water
bottle was filled and placed precisely two feet from the bottom of the
cot.

These tremendous undertakings yielded to his determination; one by
one they were announced to Mrs. Babbitt and smashed through to
accomplishment. At last his brow cleared, and in his "Gnight!" rang
virile power. But there was yet need of courage. As he sank into sleep,
just at the first exquisite relaxation, the Doppelbrau car came home.
He bounced into wakefulness, lamenting, "Why the devil can't some people
never get to bed at a reasonable hour?" So familiar was he with the
process of putting up his own car that he awaited each step like an able
executioner condemned to his own rack.

The car insultingly cheerful on the driveway. The car door opened and
banged shut, then the garage door slid open, grating on the sill, and
the car door again. The motor raced for the climb up into the garage and
raced once more, explosively, before it was shut off. A final opening
and slamming of the car door. Silence then, a horrible silence filled
with waiting, till the leisurely Mr. Doppelbrau had examined the state
of his tires and had at last shut the garage door. Instantly, for
Babbitt, a blessed state of oblivion.


IV

At that moment In the city of Zenith, Horace Updike was making love to
Lucile McKelvey in her mauve drawing-room on Royal Ridge, after their
return from a lecture by an eminent English novelist. Updike was
Zenith's professional bachelor; a slim-waisted man of forty-six with
an effeminate voice and taste in flowers, cretonnes, and flappers. Mrs.
McKelvey was red-haired, creamy, discontented, exquisite, rude, and
honest. Updike tried his invariable first maneuver--touching her nervous
wrist.

"Don't be an idiot!" she said.

"Do you mind awfully?"

"No! That's what I mind!"

He changed to conversation. He was famous at conversation. He spoke
reasonably of psychoanalysis, Long Island polo, and the Ming platter
he had found in Vancouver. She promised to meet him in Deauville, the
coming summer, "though," she sighed, "it's becoming too dreadfully
banal; nothing but Americans and frowsy English baronesses."

And at that moment in Zenith, a cocaine-runner and a prostitute were
drinking cocktails in Healey Hanson's saloon on Front Street. Since
national prohibition was now in force, and since Zenith was notoriously
law-abiding, they were compelled to keep the cocktails innocent
by drinking them out of tea-cups. The lady threw her cup at the
cocaine-runner's head. He worked his revolver out of the pocket in his
sleeve, and casually murdered her.

At that moment in Zenith, two men sat in a laboratory. For thirty-seven
hours now they had been working on a report of their investigations of
synthetic rubber.

At that moment in Zenith, there was a conference of four union officials
as to whether the twelve thousand coal-miners within a hundred miles
of the city should strike. Of these men one resembled a testy and
prosperous grocer, one a Yankee carpenter, one a soda-clerk, and one
a Russian Jewish actor. The Russian Jew quoted Kautsky, Gene Debs, and
Abraham Lincoln.

At that moment a G. A. R. veteran was dying. He had come from the
Civil War straight to a farm which, though it was officially within
the city-limits of Zenith, was primitive as the backwoods. He had never
ridden in a motor car, never seen a bath-tub, never read any book save
the Bible, McGuffey's readers, and religious tracts; and he believed
that the earth is flat, that the English are the Lost Ten Tribes of
Israel, and that the United States is a democracy.

At that moment the steel and cement town which composed the factory of
the Pullmore Tractor Company of Zenith was running on night shift to
fill an order of tractors for the Polish army. It hummed like a million
bees, glared through its wide windows like a volcano. Along the high
wire fences, searchlights played on cinder-lined yards, switch-tracks,
and armed guards on patrol.

At that moment Mike Monday was finishing a meeting. Mr. Monday, the
distinguished evangelist, the best-known Protestant pontiff in America,
had once been a prize-fighter. Satan had not dealt justly with him. As
a prize-fighter he gained nothing but his crooked nose, his celebrated
vocabulary, and his stage-presence. The service of the Lord had been
more profitable. He was about to retire with a fortune. It had been well
earned, for, to quote his last report, "Rev. Mr. Monday, the Prophet
with a Punch, has shown that he is the world's greatest salesman of
salvation, and that by efficient organization the overhead of spiritual
regeneration may be kept down to an unprecedented rock-bottom basis. He
has converted over two hundred thousand lost and priceless souls at an
average cost of less than ten dollars a head."

Of the larger cities of the land, only Zenith had hesitated to submit
its vices to Mike Monday and his expert reclamation corps. The more
enterprising organizations of the city had voted to invite him--Mr.
George F. Babbitt had once praised him in a speech at the Boosters'
Club. But there was opposition from certain Episcopalian and
Congregationalist ministers, those renegades whom Mr. Monday so finely
called "a bunch of gospel-pushers with dish-water instead of blood, a
gang of squealers that need more dust on the knees of their pants and
more hair on their skinny old chests." This opposition had been
crushed when the secretary of the Chamber of Commerce had reported to a
committee of manufacturers that in every city where he had appeared, Mr.
Monday had turned the minds of workmen from wages and hours to higher
things, and thus averted strikes. He was immediately invited.

An expense fund of forty thousand dollars had been underwritten; out on
the County Fair Grounds a Mike Monday Tabernacle had been erected,
to seat fifteen thousand people. In it the prophet was at this moment
concluding his message:

"There's a lot of smart college professors and tea-guzzling slobs in
this burg that say I'm a roughneck and a never-wuzzer and my knowledge
of history is not-yet. Oh, there's a gang of woolly-whiskered book-lice
that think they know more than Almighty God, and prefer a lot of Hun
science and smutty German criticism to the straight and simple Word
of God. Oh, there's a swell bunch of Lizzie boys and lemon-suckers and
pie-faces and infidels and beer-bloated scribblers that love to fire off
their filthy mouths and yip that Mike Monday is vulgar and full of mush.
Those pups are saying now that I hog the gospel-show, that I'm in it
for the coin. Well, now listen, folks! I'm going to give those birds a
chance! They can stand right up here and tell me to my face that I'm a
galoot and a liar and a hick! Only if they do--if they do!--don't faint
with surprise if some of those rum-dumm liars get one good swift poke
from Mike, with all the kick of God's Flaming Righteousness behind the
wallop! Well, come on, folks! Who says it? Who says Mike Monday is a
fourflush and a yahoo? Huh? Don't I see anybody standing up? Well, there
you are! Now I guess the folks in this man's town will quit listening to
all this kyoodling from behind the fence; I guess you'll quit listening
to the guys that pan and roast and kick and beef, and vomit out filthy
atheism; and all of you 'll come in, with every grain of pep and
reverence you got, and boost all together for Jesus Christ and his
everlasting mercy and tenderness!"

At that moment Seneca Doane, the radical lawyer, and Dr. Kurt Yavitch,
the histologist (whose report on the destruction of epithelial cells
under radium had made the name of Zenith known in Munich, Prague, and
Rome), were talking in Doane's library.

"Zenith's a city with gigantic power--gigantic buildings, gigantic
machines, gigantic transportation," meditated Doane.

"I hate your city. It has standardized all the beauty out of life. It
is one big railroad station--with all the people taking tickets for the
best cemeteries," Dr. Yavitch said placidly.

Doane roused. "I'm hanged if it is! You make me sick, Kurt, with your
perpetual whine about 'standardization.' Don't you suppose any other
nation is 'standardized?' Is anything more standardized than England,
with every house that can afford it having the same muffins at the same
tea-hour, and every retired general going to exactly the same evensong
at the same gray stone church with a square tower, and every golfing
prig in Harris tweeds saying 'Right you are!' to every other prosperous
ass? Yet I love England. And for standardization--just look at the
sidewalk cafes in France and the love-making in Italy!

"Standardization is excellent, per se. When I buy an Ingersoll watch or
a Ford, I get a better tool for less money, and I know precisely what
I'm getting, and that leaves me more time and energy to be individual
in. And--I remember once in London I saw a picture of an American
suburb, in a toothpaste ad on the back of the Saturday Evening Post--an
elm-lined snowy street of these new houses, Georgian some of 'em, or
with low raking roofs and--The kind of street you'd find here in Zenith,
say in Floral Heights. Open. Trees. Grass. And I was homesick! There's
no other country in the world that has such pleasant houses. And I don't
care if they ARE standardized. It's a corking standard!

"No, what I fight in Zenith is standardization of thought, and, of
course, the traditions of competition. The real villains of the piece
are the clean, kind, industrious Family Men who use every known brand of
trickery and cruelty to insure the prosperity of their cubs. The worst
thing about these fellows is that they're so good and, in their work
at least, so intelligent. You can't hate them properly, and yet their
standardized minds are the enemy.

"Then this boosting--Sneakingly I have a notion that Zenith is a better
place to live in than Manchester or Glasgow or Lyons or Berlin or
Turin--"

"It is not, and I have lift in most of them," murmured Dr. Yavitch.

"Well, matter of taste. Personally, I prefer a city with a future so
unknown that it excites my imagination. But what I particularly want--"

"You," said Dr. Yavitch, "are a middle-road liberal, and you haven't
the slightest idea what you want. I, being a revolutionist, know exactly
what I want--and what I want now is a drink."


VI

At that moment in Zenith, Jake Offutt, the politician, and Henry T.
Thompson were in conference. Offutt suggested, "The thing to do is to
get your fool son-in-law, Babbitt, to put it over. He's one of these
patriotic guys. When he grabs a piece of property for the gang, he makes
it look like we were dyin' of love for the dear peepul, and I do love to
buy respectability--reasonable. Wonder how long we can keep it up, Hank?
We're safe as long as the good little boys like George Babbitt and all
the nice respectable labor-leaders think you and me are rugged patriots.
There's swell pickings for an honest politician here, Hank: a whole city
working to provide cigars and fried chicken and dry martinis for us,
and rallying to our banner with indignation, oh, fierce indignation,
whenever some squealer like this fellow Seneca Doane comes along!
Honest, Hank, a smart codger like me ought to be ashamed of himself if
he didn't milk cattle like them, when they come around mooing for it!
But the Traction gang can't get away with grand larceny like it used
to. I wonder when--Hank, I wish we could fix some way to run this fellow
Seneca Doane out of town. It's him or us!"

At that moment in Zenith, three hundred and forty or fifty thousand
Ordinary People were asleep, a vast unpenetrated shadow. In the slum
beyond the railroad tracks, a young man who for six months had sought
work turned on the gas and killed himself and his wife.

At that moment Lloyd Mallam, the poet, owner of the Hafiz Book Shop,
was finishing a rondeau to show how diverting was life amid the feuds of
medieval Florence, but how dull it was in so obvious a place as Zenith.

And at that moment George F. Babbitt turned ponderously in bed--the
last turn, signifying that he'd had enough of this worried business of
falling asleep and was about it in earnest.

Instantly he was in the magic dream. He was somewhere among unknown
people who laughed at him. He slipped away, ran down the paths of a
midnight garden, and at the gate the fairy child was waiting. Her
dear and tranquil hand caressed his cheek. He was gallant and wise and
well-beloved; warm ivory were her arms; and beyond perilous moors the
brave sea glittered.

 Driving to lunch, Babbitt passes the 'decayed blocks' and ignores them as usual and thinks about how much money he makes. He also decides to buy himself a new cigar lighter. At lunch, at the Zenith Athletic Club, Babbitt socializes with Vergil Gunch, the president of the club, and we see Babbitt attempt to climb the social ladder. When Paul enters, Babbitt calms down. They sit alone together, although 'privacy was very bad form' at the club. The two men tell each other of their discontentment with their lives. Paul details his unhappiness with his wife Zilla and says he tells only Babbitt how this 'sweet, clean, respectable, moral life isn't all it's cracked up to be'; other men would think he is cowardly for questioning it. When Babbitt speaks up in favor of morality, as monogamy, Paul says he would have killed himself if it had not been for Babbitt, playing the violin and three or four 'darling girls'. Paul also questions business dealings and says it is all about cutting each other's throats. Babbitt warns him that he is sounding like a socialist and Paul responds by saying he bets only a third of the men in the club are happy. They plan to have a short holiday together without their partners. In Chapter Six, before leaving for home, Babbitt refuses to give Stanley Graff a raise in pay and reminds him the men are back from the war . Babbitt feels guilty after this, though, as he does not like to lose the approval of his employees. At home, Babbitt considers how he is privately proud that his neighbors know he is so prosperous his son never has to work around the house. Whilst at dinner, Babbitt tells his family he is thinking of buying a new car. His family all argue in favor of a 'closed' car, because everyone else has one. The action shifts to Ted doing his homework and his complaint that he should not have to study 'old-fashioned junk' like Milton and Shakespeare; Myra agrees with him. Babbitt is reading the comic-strip in the newspaper and is annoyed at the interruptions. Although he has no opinion of Shakespeare, he still joins in the discussion and tells Ted he has to study it to get into college and then go to law school. Babbitt says how he never had the chance to do this. Ted argues that he would prefer to study via a correspondence course and shows Myra and Babbitt some advertisements he has saved. Babbitt still wants him to go to college, though, as this will make Ted one of the 'gentleman class'. Ted agrees and then leaves, saying he will finish his homework in the morning. After Ted's departure, more details of Babbitt's background are given. He had wanted to be a lawyer after graduating from State University, and even had the ambition of being Governor. He worked as a real-estate man whilst studying law and his friendship with Paul was a refuge until Paul was 'bespelled' by Zilla. Babbitt found comfort with Paul's second cousin, Myra Thompson. After seeing each other for a while, Myra raised the subject of marriage. He saw her more as a 'dependable companion' and did not want to tell her that he did not love her. Their marriage still took place and she became a 'Good Wife'. Babbitt gave up on his law studies and 'trudged on in a rut of listing real estate'. Chapter Seven is firstly concerned with a description of the living room. The style used is similar to that of an advertisement, and this shows how their house is generic rather than personal. There is nothing interesting in the room, but also there is nothing offensive. Before going to bed, Babbitt tells Myra that he is thinking of going on a road trip and when she agrees he realizes he does not want her to come. He regards this as a day of 'veiled rebellions'. His preparations to sleep on the sleeping-porch are made and we are told that it is not known if he sleeps there for the fresh air or because it was 'standard' to have such a sleeping-porch. Whilst he tries to sleep, the narrative shifts across the city and lists the activities of various other people. Lucile McKelvey, for example, is having an affair with Horace Updike and a prostitute is murdered in a saloon. Jake Offutt and Henry T. Thompson are discussing how they want Seneca Doane run out of town, and a young unemployed man in the slums kills himself and his wife. The chapter ends with Babbitt asleep and instantly dreaming of the fairy child.

