Chapter: I

THOUGH he saw them twice daily, though he knew and amply discussed every
detail of their expenditures, yet for weeks together Babbitt was no more
conscious of his children than of the buttons on his coat-sleeves.

The admiration of Kenneth Escott made him aware of Verona.

She had become secretary to Mr. Gruensberg of the Gruensberg Leather
Company; she did her work with the thoroughness of a mind which reveres
details and never quite understands them; but she was one of the
people who give an agitating impression of being on the point of doing
something desperate--of leaving a job or a husband--without ever doing
it. Babbitt was so hopeful about Escott's hesitant ardors that he became
the playful parent. When he returned from the Elks he peered coyly into
the living-room and gurgled, "Has our Kenny been here to-night?" He
never credited Verona's protest, "Why, Ken and I are just good friends,
and we only talk about Ideas. I won't have all this sentimental
nonsense, that would spoil everything."

It was Ted who most worried Babbitt.

With conditions in Latin and English but with a triumphant record in
manual training, basket-ball, and the organization of dances, Ted was
struggling through his Senior year in the East Side High School. At home
he was interested only when he was asked to trace some subtle ill in the
ignition system of the car. He repeated to his tut-tutting father that
he did not wish to go to college or law-school, and Babbitt was equally
disturbed by this "shiftlessness" and by Ted's relations with Eunice
Littlefield, next door.

Though she was the daughter of Howard Littlefield, that wrought-iron
fact-mill, that horse-faced priest of private ownership, Eunice was
a midge in the sun. She danced into the house, she flung herself into
Babbitt's lap when he was reading, she crumpled his paper, and laughed
at him when he adequately explained that he hated a crumpled newspaper
as he hated a broken sales-contract. She was seventeen now. Her ambition
was to be a cinema actress. She did not merely attend the showing of
every "feature film;" she also read the motion-picture magazines,
those extraordinary symptoms of the Age of Pep--monthlies and weeklies
gorgeously illustrated with portraits of young women who had recently
been manicure girls, not very skilful manicure girls, and who, unless
their every grimace had been arranged by a director, could not have
acted in the Easter cantata of the Central Methodist Church; magazines
reporting, quite seriously, in "interviews" plastered with pictures of
riding-breeches and California bungalows, the views on sculpture and
international politics of blankly beautiful, suspiciously beautiful
young men; outlining the plots of films about pure prostitutes and
kind-hearted train-robbers; and giving directions for making bootblacks
into Celebrated Scenario Authors overnight.

These authorities Eunice studied. She could, she frequently did, tell
whether it was in November or December, 1905, that Mack Harker? the
renowned screen cowpuncher and badman, began his public career as
chorus man in "Oh, You Naughty Girlie." On the wall of her room, her
father reported, she had pinned up twenty-one photographs of actors. But
the signed portrait of the most graceful of the movie heroes she carried
in her young bosom.

Babbitt was bewildered by this worship of new gods, and he suspected
that Eunice smoked cigarettes. He smelled the cloying reek from
up-stairs, and heard her giggling with Ted. He never inquired. The
agreeable child dismayed him. Her thin and charming face was sharpened
by bobbed hair; her skirts were short, her stockings were rolled, and,
as she flew after Ted, above the caressing silk were glimpses of soft
knees which made Babbitt uneasy, and wretched that she should consider
him old. Sometimes, in the veiled life of his dreams, when the
fairy child came running to him she took on the semblance of Eunice
Littlefield.

Ted was motor-mad as Eunice was movie-mad.

A thousand sarcastic refusals did not check his teasing for a car of
his own. However lax he might be about early rising and the prosody of
Vergil, he was tireless in tinkering. With three other boys he bought a
rheumatic Ford chassis, built an amazing racer-body out of tin and pine,
went skidding round corners in the perilous craft, and sold it at a
profit. Babbitt gave him a motor-cycle, and every Saturday afternoon,
with seven sandwiches and a bottle of Coca-Cola in his pockets, and
Eunice perched eerily on the rumble seat, he went roaring off to distant
towns.

Usually Eunice and he were merely neighborhood chums, and quarreled with
a wholesome and violent lack of delicacy; but now and then, after the
color and scent of a dance, they were silent together and a little
furtive, and Babbitt was worried.

Babbitt was an average father. He was affectionate, bullying,
opinionated, ignorant, and rather wistful. Like most parents, he enjoyed
the game of waiting till the victim was clearly wrong, then virtuously
pouncing. He justified himself by croaking, "Well, Ted's mother spoils
him. Got to be somebody who tells him what's what, and me, I'm elected
the goat. Because I try to bring him up to be a real, decent, human
being and not one of these sapheads and lounge-lizards, of course they
all call me a grouch!"

Throughout, with the eternal human genius for arriving by the worst
possible routes at surprisingly tolerable goals, Babbitt loved his son
and warmed to his companionship and would have sacrificed everything for
him--if he could have been sure of proper credit.


II

Ted was planning a party for his set in the Senior Class.

Babbitt meant to be helpful and jolly about it. From his memory of
high-school pleasures back in Catawba he suggested the nicest games:
Going to Boston, and charades with stew-pans for helmets, and
word-games in which you were an Adjective or a Quality. When he was most
enthusiastic he discovered that they weren't paying attention; they were
only tolerating him. As for the party, it was as fixed and standardized
as a Union Club Hop. There was to be dancing in the living-room, a noble
collation in the dining-room, and in the hall two tables of bridge for
what Ted called "the poor old dumb-bells that you can't get to dance
hardly more 'n half the time."

Every breakfast was monopolized by conferences on the affair. No one
listened to Babbitt's bulletins about the February weather or to his
throat-clearing comments on the headlines. He said furiously, "If I may
be PERMITTED to interrupt your engrossing private CONVERSATION--Juh hear
what I SAID?"

"Oh, don't be a spoiled baby! Ted and I have just as much right to talk
as you have!" flared Mrs. Babbitt.

On the night of the party he was permitted to look on, when he was not
helping Matilda with the Vecchia ice cream and the petits fours. He was
deeply disquieted. Eight years ago, when Verona had given a high-school
party, the children had been featureless gabies. Now they were men
and women of the world, very supercilious men and women; the boys
condescended to Babbitt, they wore evening-clothes, and with hauteur
they accepted cigarettes from silver cases. Babbitt had heard stories
of what the Athletic Club called "goings on" at young parties; of
girls "parking" their corsets in the dressing-room, of "cuddling" and
"petting," and a presumable increase in what was known as Immorality.
To-night he believed the stories. These children seemed bold to him, and
cold. The girls wore misty chiffon, coral velvet, or cloth of gold, and
around their dipping bobbed hair were shining wreaths. He had it, upon
urgent and secret inquiry, that no corsets were known to be parked
upstairs; but certainly these eager bodies were not stiff with steel.
Their stockings were of lustrous silk, their slippers costly and
unnatural, their lips carmined and their eyebrows penciled. They danced
cheek to cheek with the boys, and Babbitt sickened with apprehension and
unconscious envy.

Worst of them all was Eunice Littlefield, and maddest of all the boys
was Ted. Eunice was a flying demon. She slid the length of the room; her
tender shoulders swayed; her feet were deft as a weaver's shuttle; she
laughed, and enticed Babbitt to dance with her.

Then he discovered the annex to the party.

The boys and girls disappeared occasionally, and he remembered rumors
of their drinking together from hip-pocket flasks. He tiptoed round the
house, and in each of the dozen cars waiting in the street he saw the
points of light from cigarettes, from each of them heard high giggles.
He wanted to denounce them but (standing in the snow, peering round
the dark corner) he did not dare. He tried to be tactful. When he had
returned to the front hall he coaxed the boys, "Say, if any of you
fellows are thirsty, there's some dandy ginger ale."

"Oh! Thanks!" they condescended.

He sought his wife, in the pantry, and exploded, "I'd like to go in
there and throw some of those young pups out of the house! They talk
down to me like I was the butler! I'd like to--"

"I know," she sighed; "only everybody says, all the mothers tell me,
unless you stand for them, if you get angry because they go out to their
cars to have a drink, they won't come to your house any more, and we
wouldn't want Ted left out of things, would we?"

He announced that he would be enchanted to have Ted left out of things,
and hurried in to be polite, lest Ted be left out of things.

But, he resolved, if he found that the boys were drinking, he
would--well, he'd "hand 'em something that would surprise 'em." While
he was trying to be agreeable to large-shouldered young bullies he was
earnestly sniffing at them. Twice he caught the reek of prohibition-time
whisky, but then, it was only twice--

Dr. Howard Littlefield lumbered in.

He had come, in a mood of solemn parental patronage, to look on. Ted and
Eunice were dancing, moving together like one body. Littlefield gasped.
He called Eunice. There was a whispered duologue, and Littlefield
explained to Babbitt that Eunice's mother had a headache and needed her.
She went off in tears. Babbitt looked after them furiously. "That little
devil! Getting Ted into trouble! And Littlefield, the conceited old
gas-bag, acting like it was Ted that was the bad influence!"

Later he smelled whisky on Ted's breath.

After the civil farewell to the guests, the row was terrific, a thorough
Family Scene, like an avalanche, devastating and without reticences.
Babbitt thundered, Mrs. Babbitt wept, Ted was unconvincingly defiant,
and Verona in confusion as to whose side she was taking.

For several months there was coolness between the Babbitts and the
Littlefields, each family sheltering their lamb from the wolf-cub next
door. Babbitt and Littlefield still spoke in pontifical periods about
motors and the senate, but they kept bleakly away from mention of their
families. Whenever Eunice came to the house she discussed with pleasant
intimacy the fact that she had been forbidden to come to the house; and
Babbitt tried, with no success whatever, to be fatherly and advisory
with her.


III

"Gosh all fishhooks!" Ted wailed to Eunice, as they wolfed hot
chocolate, lumps of nougat, and an assortment of glace nuts, in the
mosaic splendor of the Royal Drug Store, "it gets me why Dad doesn't
just pass out from being so poky. Every evening he sits there, about
half-asleep, and if Rone or I say, 'Oh, come on, let's do something,' he
doesn't even take the trouble to think about it. He just yawns and says,
'Naw, this suits me right here.' He doesn't know there's any fun going
on anywhere. I suppose he must do some thinking, same as you and I do,
but gosh, there's no way of telling it. I don't believe that outside of
the office and playing a little bum golf on Saturday he knows there's
anything in the world to do except just keep sitting there--sitting
there every night--not wanting to go anywhere--not wanting to do
anything--thinking us kids are crazy--sitting there--Lord!"


IV

If he was frightened by Ted's slackness, Babbitt was not sufficiently
frightened by Verona. She was too safe. She lived too much in the neat
little airless room of her mind. Kenneth Escott and she were always
under foot. When they were not at home, conducting their cautiously
radical courtship over sheets of statistics, they were trudging off to
lectures by authors and Hindu philosophers and Swedish lieutenants.

"Gosh," Babbitt wailed to his wife, as they walked home from the
Fogartys' bridge-party, "it gets me how Rone and that fellow can be so
poky. They sit there night after night, whenever he isn't working,
and they don't know there's any fun in the world. All talk and
discussion--Lord! Sitting there--sitting there--night after night--not
wanting to do anything--thinking I'm crazy because I like to go out and
play a fist of cards--sitting there--gosh!"

Then round the swimmer, bored by struggling through the perpetual surf
of family life, new combers swelled.


V

Babbitt's father- and mother-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Henry T. Thompson,
rented their old house in the Bellevue district and moved to the Hotel
Hatton, that glorified boarding-house filled with widows, red-plush
furniture, and the sound of ice-water pitchers. They were lonely there,
and every other Sunday evening the Babbitts had to dine with them, on
fricasseed chicken, discouraged celery, and cornstarch ice cream, and
afterward sit, polite and restrained, in the hotel lounge, while a young
woman violinist played songs from the German via Broadway.

Then Babbitt's own mother came down from Catawba to spend three weeks.

She was a kind woman and magnificently uncomprehending. She
congratulated the convention-defying Verona on being a "nice, loyal
home-body without all these Ideas that so many girls seem to have
nowadays;" and when Ted filled the differential with grease, out of pure
love of mechanics and filthiness, she rejoiced that he was "so handy
around the house--and helping his father and all, and not going out with
the girls all the time and trying to pretend he was a society fellow."

Babbitt loved his mother, and sometimes he rather liked her, but he was
annoyed by her Christian Patience, and he was reduced to pulpiness when
she discoursed about a quite mythical hero called "Your Father":

"You won't remember it, Georgie, you were such a little fellow at the
time--my, I remember just how you looked that day, with your goldy brown
curls and your lace collar, you always were such a dainty child, and
kind of puny and sickly, and you loved pretty things so much and the red
tassels on your little bootees and all--and Your Father was taking us to
church and a man stopped us and said 'Major'--so many of the neighbors
used to call Your Father 'Major;' of course he was only a private in The
War but everybody knew that was because of the jealousy of his captain
and he ought to have been a high-ranking officer, he had that natural
ability to command that so very, very few men have--and this man came
out into the road and held up his hand and stopped the buggy and said,
'Major,' he said, 'there's a lot of the folks around here that have
decided to support Colonel Scanell for congress, and we want you to
join us. Meeting people the way you do in the store, you could help us a
lot.'

"Well, Your Father just looked at him and said, 'I certainly shall do
nothing of the sort. I don't like his politics,' he said. Well, the
man--Captain Smith they used to call him, and heaven only knows
why, because he hadn't the shadow or vestige of a right to be called
'Captain' or any other title--this Captain Smith said, 'We'll make it
hot for you if you don't stick by your friends, Major.' Well, you know
how Your Father was, and this Smith knew it too; he knew what a Real Man
he was, and he knew Your Father knew the political situation from A to
Z, and he ought to have seen that here was one man he couldn't impose
on, but he went on trying to and hinting and trying till Your Father
spoke up and said to him, 'Captain Smith,' he said, 'I have a reputation
around these parts for being one who is amply qualified to mind his own
business and let other folks mind theirs!' and with that he drove on and
left the fellow standing there in the road like a bump on a log!"

Babbitt was most exasperated when she revealed his boyhood to the
children. He had, it seemed, been fond of barley-sugar; had worn the
"loveliest little pink bow in his curls" and corrupted his own name to
"Goo-goo." He heard (though he did not officially hear) Ted admonishing
Tinka, "Come on now, kid; stick the lovely pink bow in your curls and
beat it down to breakfast, or Goo-goo will jaw your head off."

Babbitt's half-brother, Martin, with his wife and youngest baby, came
down from Catawba for two days. Martin bred cattle and ran the dusty
general-store. He was proud of being a freeborn independent American of
the good old Yankee stock; he was proud of being honest, blunt, ugly,
and disagreeable. His favorite remark was "How much did you pay for
that?" He regarded Verona's books, Babbitt's silver pencil, and flowers
on the table as citified extravagances, and said so. Babbitt would have
quarreled with him but for his gawky wife and the baby, whom Babbitt
teased and poked fingers at and addressed:

"I think this baby's a bum, yes, sir, I think this little baby's a bum,
he's a bum, yes, sir, he's a bum, that's what he is, he's a bum, this
baby's a bum, he's nothing but an old bum, that's what he is--a bum!"

All the while Verona and Kenneth Escott held long inquiries into
epistemology; Ted was a disgraced rebel; and Tinka, aged eleven, was
demanding that she be allowed to go to the movies thrice a week, "like
all the girls."

Babbitt raged, "I'm sick of it! Having to carry three generations. Whole
damn bunch lean on me. Pay half of mother's income, listen to Henry
T., listen to Myra's worrying, be polite to Mart, and get called an old
grouch for trying to help the children. All of 'em depending on me and
picking on me and not a damn one of 'em grateful! No relief, and no
credit, and no help from anybody. And to keep it up for--good Lord, how
long?"

He enjoyed being sick in February; he was delighted by their
consternation that he, the rock, should give way.

He had eaten a questionable clam. For two days he was languorous and
petted and esteemed. He was allowed to snarl "Oh, let me alone!" without
reprisals. He lay on the sleeping-porch and watched the winter sun slide
along the taut curtains, turning their ruddy khaki to pale blood red.
The shadow of the draw-rope was dense black, in an enticing ripple on
the canvas. He found pleasure in the curve of it, sighed as the fading
light blurred it. He was conscious of life, and a little sad. With no
Vergil Gunches before whom to set his face in resolute optimism, he
beheld, and half admitted that he beheld, his way of life as incredibly
mechanical. Mechanical business--a brisk selling of badly built houses.
Mechanical religion--a dry, hard church, shut off from the real life
of the streets, inhumanly respectable as a top-hat. Mechanical golf and
dinner-parties and bridge and conversation. Save with Paul Riesling,
mechanical friendships--back-slapping and jocular, never daring to essay
the test of quietness.

He turned uneasily in bed.

He saw the years, the brilliant winter days and all the long sweet
afternoons which were meant for summery meadows, lost in such brittle
pretentiousness. He thought of telephoning about leases, of cajoling men
he hated, of making business calls and waiting in dirty anterooms--hat
on knee, yawning at fly-specked calendars, being polite to office-boys.

"I don't hardly want to go back to work," he prayed. "I'd like to--I
don't know."

But he was back next day, busy and of doubtful temper.





I

THE Zenith Street Traction Company planned to build car-repair shops in
the suburb of Dorchester, but when they came to buy the land they
found it held, on options, by the Babbitt-Thompson Realty Company. The
purchasing-agent, the first vice-president, and even the president of
the Traction Company protested against the Babbitt price. They mentioned
their duty toward stockholders, they threatened an appeal to the courts,
though somehow the appeal to the courts was never carried out and the
officials found it wiser to compromise with Babbitt. Carbon copies of
the correspondence are in the company's files, where they may be viewed
by any public commission.

Just after this Babbitt deposited three thousand dollars in the bank,
the purchasing-agent of the Street Traction Company bought a five
thousand dollar car, the first vice-president built a home in Devon
Woods, and the president was appointed minister to a foreign country.

To obtain the options, to tie up one man's land without letting his
neighbor know, had been an unusual strain on Babbitt. It was necessary
to introduce rumors about planning garages and stores, to pretend
that he wasn't taking any more options, to wait and look as bored as a
poker-player at a time when the failure to secure a key-lot threatened
his whole plan. To all this was added a nerve-jabbing quarrel with his
secret associates in the deal. They did not wish Babbitt and Thompson
to have any share in the deal except as brokers. Babbitt rather
agreed. "Ethics of the business-broker ought to strictly represent his
principles and not get in on the buying," he said to Thompson.

"Ethics, rats! Think I'm going to see that bunch of holy grafters get
away with the swag and us not climb in?" snorted old Henry.

"Well, I don't like to do it. Kind of double-crossing."

"It ain't. It's triple-crossing. It's the public that gets
double-crossed. Well, now we've been ethical and got it out of our
systems, the question is where we can raise a loan to handle some of
the property for ourselves, on the Q. T. We can't go to our bank for it.
Might come out."

"I could see old Eathorne. He's close as the tomb."

"That's the stuff."

Eathorne was glad, he said, to "invest in character," to make Babbitt
the loan and see to it that the loan did not appear on the books of the
bank. Thus certain of the options which Babbitt and Thompson obtained
were on parcels of real estate which they themselves owned, though the
property did not appear in their names.

In the midst of closing this splendid deal, which stimulated business
and public confidence by giving an example of increased real-estate
activity, Babbitt was overwhelmed to find that he had a dishonest person
working for him.

The dishonest one was Stanley Graff, the outside salesman.

For some time Babbitt had been worried about Graff. He did not keep his
word to tenants. In order to rent a house he would promise repairs
which the owner had not authorized. It was suspected that he juggled
inventories of furnished houses so that when the tenant left he had
to pay for articles which had never been in the house and the price
of which Graff put into his pocket. Babbitt had not been able to prove
these suspicions, and though he had rather planned to discharge Graff he
had never quite found time for it.

Now into Babbitt's private room charged a red-faced man, panting, "Look
here! I've come to raise particular merry hell, and unless you have that
fellow pinched, I will!" "What's--Calm down, o' man. What's trouble?"

"Trouble! Huh! Here's the trouble--"

"Sit down and take it easy! They can hear you all over the building!"

"This fellow Graff you got working for you, he leases me a house. I
was in yesterday and signs the lease, all O.K., and he was to get the
owner's signature and mail me the lease last night. Well, and he did.
This morning I comes down to breakfast and the girl says a fellow had
come to the house right after the early delivery and told her he wanted
an envelope that had been mailed by mistake, big long envelope with
'Babbitt-Thompson' in the corner of it. Sure enough, there it was, so
she lets him have it. And she describes the fellow to me, and it was
this Graff. So I 'phones to him and he, the poor fool, he admits it! He
says after my lease was all signed he got a better offer from another
fellow and he wanted my lease back. Now what you going to do about it?"

"Your name is--?"

"William Varney--W. K. Varney."

"Oh, yes. That was the Garrison house." Babbitt sounded the buzzer. When
Miss McGoun came in, he demanded, "Graff gone out?"

"Yes, sir."

"Will you look through his desk and see if there is a lease made out to
Mr. Varney on the Garrison house?" To Varney: "Can't tell you how sorry
I am this happened. Needless to say, I'll fire Graff the minute he comes
in. And of course your lease stands. But there's one other thing I'd
like to do. I'll tell the owner not to pay us the commission but apply
it to your rent. No! Straight! I want to. To be frank, this thing shakes
me up bad. I suppose I've always been a Practical Business Man. Probably
I've told one or two fairy stories in my time, when the occasion called
for it--you know: sometimes you have to lay things on thick, to impress
boneheads. But this is the first time I've ever had to accuse one of
my own employees of anything more dishonest than pinching a few stamps.
Honest, it would hurt me if we profited by it. So you'll let me hand you
the commission? Good!"


II

He walked through the February city, where trucks flung up a spattering
of slush and the sky was dark above dark brick cornices. He came back
miserable. He, who respected the law, had broken it by concealing the
Federal crime of interception of the mails. But he could not see Graff
go to jail and his wife suffer. Worse, he had to discharge Graff and
this was a part of office routine which he feared. He liked people
so much, he so much wanted them to like him that he could not bear
insulting them.

Miss McGoun dashed in to whisper, with the excitement of an approaching
scene, "He's here!"

"Mr. Graff? Ask him to come in."

He tried to make himself heavy and calm in his chair, and to keep his
eyes expressionless. Graff stalked in--a man of thirty-five, dapper,
eye-glassed, with a foppish mustache.

"Want me?" said Graff.

"Yes. Sit down."

Graff continued to stand, grunting, "I suppose that old nut Varney has
been in to see you. Let me explain about him. He's a regular tightwad,
and he sticks out for every cent, and he practically lied to me about
his ability to pay the rent--I found that out just after we signed up.
And then another fellow comes along with a better offer for the house,
and I felt it was my duty to the firm to get rid of Varney, and I was
so worried about it I skun up there and got back the lease. Honest, Mr.
Babbitt, I didn't intend to pull anything crooked. I just wanted the
firm to have all the commis--"

"Wait now, Stan. This may all be true, but I've been having a lot of
complaints about you. Now I don't s'pose you ever mean to do wrong,
and I think if you just get a good lesson that'll jog you up a little,
you'll turn out a first-class realtor yet. But I don't see how I can
keep you on."

Graff leaned against the filing-cabinet, his hands in his pockets, and
laughed. "So I'm fired! Well, old Vision and Ethics, I'm tickled
to death! But I don't want you to think you can get away with any
holier-than-thou stuff. Sure I've pulled some raw stuff--a little of
it--but how could I help it, in this office?"

"Now, by God, young man--"

"Tut, tut! Keep the naughty temper down, and don't holler, because
everybody in the outside office will hear you. They're probably
listening right now. Babbitt, old dear, you're crooked in the first
place and a damn skinflint in the second. If you paid me a decent salary
I wouldn't have to steal pennies off a blind man to keep my wife from
starving. Us married just five months, and her the nicest girl living,
and you keeping us flat broke all the time, you damned old thief, so you
can put money away for your saphead of a son and your wishywashy fool
of a daughter! Wait, now! You'll by God take it, or I'll bellow so the
whole office will hear it! And crooked--Say, if I told the prosecuting
attorney what I know about this last Street Traction option steal, both
you and me would go to jail, along with some nice, clean, pious, high-up
traction guns!"

"Well, Stan, looks like we were coming down to cases. That deal--There
was nothing crooked about it. The only way you can get progress is for
the broad-gauged men to get things done; and they got to be rewarded--"

"Oh, for Pete's sake, don't get virtuous on me! As I gather it, I'm
fired. All right. It's a good thing for me. And if I catch you knocking
me to any other firm, I'll squeal all I know about you and Henry T. and
the dirty little lickspittle deals that you corporals of industry pull
off for the bigger and brainier crooks, and you'll get chased out of
town. And me--you're right, Babbitt, I've been going crooked, but now
I'm going straight, and the first step will be to get a job in some
office where the boss doesn't talk about Ideals. Bad luck, old dear, and
you can stick your job up the sewer!"

Babbitt sat for a long time, alternately raging, "I'll have him
arrested," and yearning "I wonder--No, I've never done anything that
wasn't necessary to keep the Wheels of Progress moving."

Next day he hired in Graff's place Fritz Weilinger, the salesman of his
most injurious rival, the East Side Homes and Development Company, and
thus at once annoyed his competitor and acquired an excellent man.
Young Fritz was a curly-headed, merry, tennis-playing youngster. He made
customers welcome to the office. Babbitt thought of him as a son, and in
him had much comfort.


III

An abandoned race-track on the outskirts of Chicago, a plot excellent
for factory sites, was to be sold, and Jake Offut asked Babbitt to
bid on it for him. The strain of the Street Traction deal and his
disappointment in Stanley Graff had so shaken Babbitt that he found
it hard to sit at his desk and concentrate. He proposed to his family,
"Look here, folks! Do you know who's going to trot up to Chicago for a
couple of days--just week-end; won't lose but one day of school--know
who's going with that celebrated business-ambassador, George F. Babbitt?
Why, Mr. Theodore Roosevelt Babbitt!"

"Hurray!" Ted shouted, and "Oh, maybe the Babbitt men won't paint that
lil ole town red!"

And, once away from the familiar implications of home, they were two men
together. Ted was young only in his assumption of oldness, and the only
realms, apparently, in which Babbitt had a larger and more grown-up
knowledge than Ted's were the details of real estate and the phrases of
politics. When the other sages of the Pullman smoking-compartment had
left them to themselves, Babbitt's voice did not drop into the playful
and otherwise offensive tone in which one addresses children but
continued its overwhelming and monotonous rumble, and Ted tried to
imitate it in his strident tenor:

"Gee, dad, you certainly did show up that poor boot when he got flip
about the League of Nations!"

"Well, the trouble with a lot of these fellows is, they simply don't
know what they're talking about. They don't get down to facts.... What
do you think of Ken Escott?"

"I'll tell you, dad: it strikes me Ken is a nice lad; no special faults
except he smokes too much; but slow, Lord! Why, if we don't give him
a shove the poor dumb-bell never will propose! And Rone just as bad.
Slow."

"Yes, I guess you're right. They're slow. They haven't either one of 'em
got our pep."

"That's right. They're slow. I swear, dad, I don't know how Rone got
into our family! I'll bet, if the truth were known, you were a bad old
egg when you were a kid!"

"Well, I wasn't so slow!"

"I'll bet you weren't! I'll bet you didn't miss many tricks!"

"Well, when I was out with the girls I didn't spend all the time telling
'em about the strike in the knitting industry!"

They roared together, and together lighted cigars.

"What are we going to do with 'em?" Babbitt consulted.

"Gosh, I don't know. I swear, sometimes I feel like taking Ken aside and
putting him over the jumps and saying to him, 'Young fella me lad, are
you going to marry young Rone, or are you going to talk her to death?
Here you are getting on toward thirty, and you're only making twenty or
twenty-five a week. When you going to develop a sense of responsibility
and get a raise? If there's anything that George F. or I can do to help
you, call on us, but show a little speed, anyway!'"

"Well, at that, it might not be so bad if you or I talked to him, except
he might not understand. He's one of these high brows. He can't come
down to cases and lay his cards on the table and talk straight out from
the shoulder, like you or I can."

"That's right, he's like all these highbrows."

"That's so, like all of 'em."

"That's a fact."

They sighed, and were silent and thoughtful and happy.

The conductor came in. He had once called at Babbitt's office, to ask
about houses. "H' are you, Mr. Babbitt! We going to have you with us to
Chicago? This your boy?"

"Yes, this is my son Ted."

"Well now, what do you know about that! Here I been thinking you were
a youngster yourself, not a day over forty, hardly, and you with this
great big fellow!"

"Forty? Why, brother, I'll never see forty-five again!"

"Is that a fact! Wouldn't hardly 'a' thought it!"

"Yes, sir, it's a bad give-away for the old man when he has to travel
with a young whale like Ted here!"

"You're right, it is." To Ted: "I suppose you're in college now?"

Proudly, "No, not till next fall. I'm just kind of giving the diff'rent
colleges the once-over now."

As the conductor went on his affable way, huge watch-chain jingling
against his blue chest, Babbitt and Ted gravely considered colleges.
They arrived at Chicago late at night; they lay abed in the morning,
rejoicing, "Pretty nice not to have to get up and get down to breakfast,
heh?" They were staying at the modest Eden Hotel, because Zenith
business men always stayed at the Eden, but they had dinner in the
brocade and crystal Versailles Room of the Regency Hotel. Babbitt
ordered Blue Point oysters with cocktail sauce, a tremendous steak with
a tremendous platter of French fried potatoes, two pots of coffee, apple
pie with ice cream for both of them and, for Ted, an extra piece of
mince pie.

"Hot stuff! Some feed, young fella!" Ted admired.

"Huh! You stick around with me, old man, and I'll show you a good time!"

They went to a musical comedy and nudged each other at the matrimonial
jokes and the prohibition jokes; they paraded the lobby, arm in arm,
between acts, and in the glee of his first release from the shame which
dissevers fathers and sons Ted chuckled, "Dad, did you ever hear the one
about the three milliners and the judge?"

When Ted had returned to Zenith, Babbitt was lonely. As he was trying
to make alliance between Offutt and certain Milwaukee interests which
wanted the race-track plot, most of his time was taken up in waiting for
telephone calls.... Sitting on the edge of his bed, holding the portable
telephone, asking wearily, "Mr. Sagen not in yet? Didn' he leave any
message for me? All right, I'll hold the wire." Staring at a stain on
the wall, reflecting that it resembled a shoe, and being bored by this
twentieth discovery that it resembled a shoe. Lighting a cigarette;
then, bound to the telephone with no ashtray in reach, wondering what
to do with this burning menace and anxiously trying to toss it into the
tiled bathroom. At last, on the telephone, "No message, eh? All right,
I'll call up again."

One afternoon he wandered through snow-rutted streets of which he
had never heard, streets of small tenements and two-family houses and
marooned cottages. It came to him that he had nothing to do, that there
was nothing he wanted to do. He was bleakly lonely in the evening, when
he dined by himself at the Regency Hotel. He sat in the lobby afterward,
in a plush chair bedecked with the Saxe-Coburg arms, lighting a cigar
and looking for some one who would come and play with him and save him
from thinking. In the chair next to him (showing the arms of Lithuania)
was a half-familiar man, a large red-faced man with pop eyes and a
deficient yellow mustache. He seemed kind and insignificant, and as
lonely as Babbitt himself. He wore a tweed suit and a reluctant orange
tie.

It came to Babbitt with a pyrotechnic crash. The melancholy stranger was
Sir Gerald Doak.

Instinctively Babbitt rose, bumbling, "How 're you, Sir Gerald? 'Member
we met in Zenith, at Charley McKelvey's? Babbitt's my name--real
estate."

"Oh! How d' you do." Sir Gerald shook hands flabbily.

Embarrassed, standing, wondering how he could retreat, Babbitt
maundered, "Well, I suppose you been having a great trip since we saw
you in Zenith."

"Quite. British Columbia and California and all over the place," he said
doubtfully, looking at Babbitt lifelessly.

"How did you find business conditions in British Columbia? Or I suppose
maybe you didn't look into 'em. Scenery and sport and so on?"

"Scenery? Oh, capital. But business conditions--You know, Mr. Babbitt,
they're having almost as much unemployment as we are." Sir Gerald was
speaking warmly now.

"So? Business conditions not so doggone good, eh?"

"No, business conditions weren't at all what I'd hoped to find them."

"Not good, eh?"

"No, not--not really good."

"That's a darn shame. Well--I suppose you're waiting for somebody to
take you out to some big shindig, Sir Gerald."

"Shindig? Oh. Shindig. No, to tell you the truth, I was wondering what
the deuce I could do this evening. Don't know a soul in Tchicahgo. I
wonder if you happen to know whether there's a good theater in this
city?"

"Good? Why say, they're running grand opera right now! I guess maybe
you'd like that."

"Eh? Eh? Went to the opera once in London. Covent Garden sort of thing.
Shocking! No, I was wondering if there was a good cinema-movie."

Babbitt was sitting down, hitching his chair over, shouting, "Movie?
Say, Sir Gerald, I supposed of course you had a raft of dames waiting to
lead you out to some soiree--"

"God forbid!"

"--but if you haven't, what do you say you and me go to a movie? There's
a peach of a film at the Grantham: Bill Hart in a bandit picture."

"Right-o! Just a moment while I get my coat."

Swollen with greatness, slightly afraid lest the noble blood of
Nottingham change its mind and leave him at any street corner, Babbitt
paraded with Sir Gerald Doak to the movie palace and in silent bliss sat
beside him, trying not to be too enthusiastic, lest the knight despise
his adoration of six-shooters and broncos. At the end Sir Gerald
murmured, "Jolly good picture, this. So awfully decent of you to take
me. Haven't enjoyed myself so much for weeks. All these Hostesses--they
never let you go to the cinema!"

"The devil you say!" Babbitt's speech had lost the delicate refinement
and all the broad A's with which he had adorned it, and become hearty
and natural. "Well, I'm tickled to death you liked it, Sir Gerald."

They crawled past the knees of fat women into the aisle; they stood in
the lobby waving their arms in the rite of putting on overcoats. Babbitt
hinted, "Say, how about a little something to eat? I know a place where
we could get a swell rarebit, and we might dig up a little drink--that
is, if you ever touch the stuff."

"Rather! But why don't you come to my room? I've some Scotch--not half
bad."

"Oh, I don't want to use up all your hootch. It's darn nice of you,
but--You probably want to hit the hay."

Sir Gerald was transformed. He was beefily yearning. "Oh really, now;
I haven't had a decent evening for so long! Having to go to all these
dances. No chance to discuss business and that sort of thing. Do be a
good chap and come along. Won't you?"

"Will I? You bet! I just thought maybe--Say, by golly, it does do a
fellow good, don't it, to sit and visit about business conditions,
after he's been to these balls and masquerades and banquets and all
that society stuff. I often feel that way in Zenith. Sure, you bet I'll
come."

"That's awfully nice of you." They beamed along the street. "Look
here, old chap, can you tell me, do American cities always keep up this
dreadful social pace? All these magnificent parties?"

"Go on now, quit your kidding! Gosh, you with court balls and functions
and everything--"

"No, really, old chap! Mother and I--Lady Doak, I should say, we usually
play a hand of bezique and go to bed at ten. Bless my soul, I couldn't
keep up your beastly pace! And talking! All your American women, they
know so much--culture and that sort of thing. This Mrs. McKelvey--your
friend--"

"Yuh, old Lucile. Good kid."

"--she asked me which of the galleries I liked best in Florence. Or was
it in Firenze? Never been in Italy in my life! And primitives. Did I
like primitives. Do you know what the deuce a primitive is?"

"Me? I should say not! But I know what a discount for cash is."

"Rather! So do I, by George! But primitives!"

"Yuh! Primitives!"

They laughed with the sound of a Boosters' luncheon.

Sir Gerald's room was, except for his ponderous and durable English
bags, very much like the room of George F. Babbitt; and quite in the
manner of Babbitt he disclosed a huge whisky flask, looked proud and
hospitable, and chuckled, "Say, when, old chap."

It was after the third drink that Sir Gerald proclaimed, "How do you
Yankees get the notion that writing chaps like Bertrand Shaw and this
Wells represent us? The real business England, we think those chaps are
traitors. Both our countries have their comic Old Aristocracy--you know,
old county families, hunting people and all that sort of thing--and we
both have our wretched labor leaders, but we both have a backbone of
sound business men who run the whole show."

"You bet. Here's to the real guys!"

"I'm with you! Here's to ourselves!"

It was after the fourth drink that Sir Gerald asked humbly, "What do you
think of North Dakota mortgages?" but it was not till after the fifth
that Babbitt began to call him "Jerry," and Sir Gerald confided, "I
say, do you mind if I pull off my boots?" and ecstatically stretched his
knightly feet, his poor, tired, hot, swollen feet out on the bed.

After the sixth, Babbitt irregularly arose. "Well, I better be hiking
along. Jerry, you're a regular human being! I wish to thunder we'd been
better acquainted in Zenith. Lookit. Can't you come back and stay with
me a while?"

"So sorry--must go to New York to-morrow. Most awfully sorry, old boy.
I haven't enjoyed an evening so much since I've been in the States.
Real talk. Not all this social rot. I'd never have let them give me the
beastly title--and I didn't get it for nothing, eh?--if I'd thought I'd
have to talk to women about primitives and polo! Goodish thing to have
in Nottingham, though; annoyed the mayor most frightfully when I got it;
and of course the missus likes it. But nobody calls me 'Jerry' now--"
He was almost weeping. "--and nobody in the States has treated me like a
friend till to-night! Good-by, old chap, good-by! Thanks awfully!"

"Don't mention it, Jerry. And remember whenever you get to Zenith, the
latch-string is always out."

"And don't forget, old boy, if you ever come to Nottingham, Mother and
I will be frightfully glad to see you. I shall tell the fellows in
Nottingham your ideas about Visions and Real Guys--at our next Rotary
Club luncheon."


IV

Babbitt lay abed at his hotel, imagining the Zenith Athletic Club asking
him, "What kind of a time d'you have in Chicago?" and his answering,
"Oh, fair; ran around with Sir Gerald Doak a lot;" picturing himself
meeting Lucile McKelvey and admonishing her, "You're all right, Mrs.
Mac, when you aren't trying to pull this highbrow pose. It's just as
Gerald Doak says to me in Chicago--oh, yes, Jerry's an old friend of
mine--the wife and I are thinking of running over to England to stay
with Jerry in his castle, next year--and he said to me, 'Georgie, old
bean, I like Lucile first-rate, but you and me, George, we got to make
her get over this highty-tighty hooptediddle way she's got."

But that evening a thing happened which wrecked his pride.


V

At the Regency Hotel cigar-counter he fell to talking with a salesman
of pianos, and they dined together. Babbitt was filled with friendliness
and well-being. He enjoyed the gorgeousness of the dining-room: the
chandeliers, the looped brocade curtains, the portraits of French kings
against panels of gilded oak. He enjoyed the crowd: pretty women, good
solid fellows who were "liberal spenders."

He gasped. He stared, and turned away, and stared again. Three tables
off, with a doubtful sort of woman, a woman at once coy and withered,
was Paul Riesling, and Paul was supposed to be in Akron, selling
tar-roofing. The woman was tapping his hand, mooning at him and
giggling. Babbitt felt that he had encountered something involved
and harmful. Paul was talking with the rapt eagerness of a man who is
telling his troubles. He was concentrated on the woman's faded eyes.
Once he held her hand and once, blind to the other guests, he puckered
his lips as though he was pretending to kiss her. Babbitt had so strong
an impulse to go to Paul that he could feel his body uncoiling, his
shoulders moving, but he felt, desperately, that he must be diplomatic,
and not till he saw Paul paying the check did he bluster to the
piano-salesman, "By golly--friend of mine over there--'scuse me
second--just say hello to him."

He touched Paul's shoulder, and cried, "Well, when did you hit town?"

Paul glared up at him, face hardening. "Oh, hello, George. Thought you'd
gone back to Zenith." He did not introduce his companion. Babbitt peeped
at her. She was a flabbily pretty, weakly flirtatious woman of forty-two
or three, in an atrocious flowery hat. Her rouging was thorough but
unskilful.

"Where you staying, Paulibus?"

The woman turned, yawned, examined her nails. She seemed accustomed to
not being introduced.

Paul grumbled, "Campbell Inn, on the South Side."

"Alone?" It sounded insinuating.

"Yes! Unfortunately!" Furiously Paul turned toward the woman, smiling
with a fondness sickening to Babbitt. "May! Want to introduce you. Mrs.
Arnold, this is my old-acquaintance, George Babbitt."

"Pleasmeech," growled Babbitt, while she gurgled, "Oh, I'm very pleased
to meet any friend of Mr. Riesling's, I'm sure."

Babbitt demanded, "Be back there later this evening, Paul? I'll drop
down and see you."

"No, better--We better lunch together to-morrow."

"All right, but I'll see you to-night, too, Paul. I'll go down to your
hotel, and I'll wait for you!"





I

HE sat smoking with the piano-salesman, clinging to the warm refuge of
gossip, afraid to venture into thoughts of Paul. He was the more affable
on the surface as secretly he became more apprehensive, felt more
hollow. He was certain that Paul was in Chicago without Zilla's
knowledge, and that he was doing things not at all moral and secure.
When the salesman yawned that he had to write up his orders, Babbitt
left him, left the hotel, in leisurely calm. But savagely he said
"Campbell Inn!" to the taxi-driver. He sat agitated on the slippery
leather seat, in that chill dimness which smelled of dust and perfume
and Turkish cigarettes. He did not heed the snowy lake-front, the dark
spaces and sudden bright corners in the unknown land south of the Loop.

The office of the Campbell Inn was hard, bright, new; the night clerk
harder and brighter. "Yep?" he said to Babbitt.

"Mr. Paul Riesling registered here?"

"Yep."

"Is he in now?"

"Nope."

"Then if you'll give me his key, I'll wait for him."

"Can't do that, brother. Wait down here if you wanna."

Babbitt had spoken with the deference which all the Clan of Good Fellows
give to hotel clerks. Now he said with snarling abruptness:

"I may have to wait some time. I'm Riesling's brother-in-law. I'll go up
to his room. D' I look like a sneak-thief?"

His voice was low and not pleasant. With considerable haste the
clerk took down the key, protesting, "I never said you looked like a
sneak-thief. Just rules of the hotel. But if you want to--"

On his way up in the elevator Babbitt wondered why he was here. Why
shouldn't Paul be dining with a respectable married woman? Why had he
lied to the clerk about being Paul's brother-in-law? He had acted like a
child. He must be careful not to say foolish dramatic things to Paul.
As he settled down he tried to look pompous and placid. Then the
thought--Suicide. He'd been dreading that, without knowing it. Paul
would be just the person to do something like that. He must be out of
his head or he wouldn't be confiding in that--that dried-up hag.

Zilla (oh, damn Zilla! how gladly he'd throttle that nagging fiend of a
woman!)--she'd probably succeeded at last, and driven Paul crazy.

Suicide. Out there in the lake, way out, beyond the piled ice along the
shore. It would be ghastly cold to drop into the water to-night.

Or--throat cut--in the bathroom--

Babbitt flung into Paul's bathroom. It was empty. He smiled, feebly.

He pulled at his choking collar, looked at his watch, opened the window
to stare down at the street, looked at his watch, tried to read the
evening paper lying on the glass-topped bureau, looked again at his
watch. Three minutes had gone by since he had first looked at it.

And he waited for three hours.

He was sitting fixed, chilled, when the doorknob turned. Paul came in
glowering.

"Hello," Paul said. "Been waiting?"

"Yuh, little while."

"Well?"

"Well what? Just thought I'd drop in to see how you made out in Akron."

"I did all right. What difference does it make?"

"Why, gosh, Paul, what are you sore about?"

"What are you butting into my affairs for?"

"Why, Paul, that's no way to talk! I'm not butting into nothing. I was
so glad to see your ugly old phiz that I just dropped in to say howdy."

"Well, I'm not going to have anybody following me around and trying to
boss me. I've had all of that I'm going to stand!"

"Well, gosh, I'm not--"

"I didn't like the way you looked at May Arnold, or the snooty way you
talked."

"Well, all right then! If you think I'm a buttinsky, then I'll just butt
in! I don't know who your May Arnold is, but I know doggone good and
well that you and her weren't talking about tar-roofing, no, nor about
playing the violin, neither! If you haven't got any moral consideration
for yourself, you ought to have some for your position in the community.
The idea of your going around places gawping into a female's eyes like
a love-sick pup! I can understand a fellow slipping once, but I don't
propose to see a fellow that's been as chummy with me as you have
getting started on the downward path and sneaking off from his wife,
even as cranky a one as Zilla, to go woman-chasing--"

"Oh, you're a perfectly moral little husband!"

"I am, by God! I've never looked at any woman except Myra since I've
been married--practically--and I never will! I tell you there's nothing
to immorality. It don't pay. Can't you see, old man, it just makes Zilla
still crankier?"

Slight of resolution as he was of body, Paul threw his snow-beaded
overcoat on the floor and crouched on a flimsy cane chair. "Oh, you're
an old blowhard, and you know less about morality than Tinka, but you're
all right, Georgie. But you can't understand that--I'm through. I can't
go Zilla's hammering any longer. She's made up her mind that I'm a
devil, and--Reg'lar Inquisition. Torture. She enjoys it. It's a game to
see how sore she can make me. And me, either it's find a little comfort,
any comfort, anywhere, or else do something a lot worse. Now this Mrs.
Arnold, she's not so young, but she's a fine woman and she understands a
fellow, and she's had her own troubles."

"Yea! I suppose she's one of these hens whose husband 'doesn't
understand her'!"

"I don't know. Maybe. He was killed in the war."

Babbitt lumbered up, stood beside Paul patting his shoulder, making soft
apologetic noises.

"Honest, George, she's a fine woman, and she's had one hell of a time.
We manage to jolly each other up a lot. We tell each other we're the
dandiest pair on earth. Maybe we don't believe it, but it helps a lot
to have somebody with whom you can be perfectly simple, and not all this
discussing--explaining--"

"And that's as far as you go?"

"It is not! Go on! Say it!"

"Well, I don't--I can't say I like it, but--" With a burst which left
him feeling large and shining with generosity, "it's none of my darn
business! I'll do anything I can for you, if there's anything I can do."

"There might be. I judge from Zilla's letters that 've been forwarded
from Akron that she's getting suspicious about my staying away so long.
She'd be perfectly capable of having me shadowed, and of coming to
Chicago and busting into a hotel dining-room and bawling me out before
everybody."

"I'll take care of Zilla. I'll hand her a good fairy-story when I get
back to Zenith."

"I don't know--I don't think you better try it. You're a good fellow,
but I don't know that diplomacy is your strong point." Babbitt looked
hurt, then irritated. "I mean with women! With women, I mean. Course
they got to go some to beat you in business diplomacy, but I just
mean with women. Zilla may do a lot of rough talking, but she's pretty
shrewd. She'd have the story out of you in no time."

"Well, all right, but--" Babbitt was still pathetic at not being allowed
to play Secret Agent. Paul soothed:

"Course maybe you might tell her you'd been in Akron and seen me there."

"Why, sure, you bet! Don't I have to go look at that candy-store
property in Akron? Don't I? Ain't it a shame I have to stop off there
when I'm so anxious to get home? Ain't it a regular shame? I'll say it
is! I'll say it's a doggone shame!"

"Fine. But for glory hallelujah's sake don't go putting any fancy
fixings on the story. When men lie they always try to make it too
artistic, and that's why women get suspicious. And--Let's have a drink,
Georgie. I've got some gin and a little vermouth."

The Paul who normally refused a second cocktail took a second now, and
a third. He became red-eyed and thick-tongued. He was embarrassingly
jocular and salacious.

In the taxicab Babbitt incredulously found tears crowding into his eyes.


II

He had not told Paul of his plan but he did stop at Akron, between
trains, for the one purpose of sending to Zilla a postcard with "Had to
come here for the day, ran into Paul." In Zenith he called on her.
If for public appearances Zilla was over-coiffed, over-painted,
and resolutely corseted, for private misery she wore a filthy blue
dressing-gown and torn stockings thrust into streaky pink satin mules.
Her face was sunken. She seemed to have but half as much hair as Babbitt
remembered, and that half was stringy. She sat in a rocker amid a debris
of candy-boxes and cheap magazines, and she sounded dolorous when she
did not sound derisive. But Babbitt was exceedingly breezy:

"Well, well, Zil, old dear, having a good loaf while hubby's away?
That's the ideal I'll bet a hat Myra never got up till ten, while I was
in Chicago. Say, could I borrow your thermos--just dropped in to see
if I could borrow your thermos bottle. We're going to have a toboggan
party--want to take some coffee mit. Oh, did you get my card from Akron,
saying I'd run into Paul?"

"Yes. What was he doing?"

"How do you mean?" He unbuttoned his overcoat, sat tentatively on the
arm of a chair.

"You know how I mean!" She slapped the pages of a magazine with an
irritable clatter. "I suppose he was trying to make love to some hotel
waitress or manicure girl or somebody."

"Hang it, you're always letting on that Paul goes round chasing skirts.
He doesn't, in the first place, and if he did, it would prob'ly be
because you keep hinting at him and dinging at him so much. I hadn't
meant to, Zilla, but since Paul is away, in Akron--"

"He really is in Akron? I know he has some horrible woman that he writes
to in Chicago."

"Didn't I tell you I saw him in Akron? What 're you trying to do? Make
me out a liar?"

"No, but I just--I get so worried."

"Now, there you are! That's what gets me! Here you love Paul, and yet
you plague him and cuss him out as if you hated him. I simply can't
understand why it is that the more some folks love people, the harder
they try to make 'em miserable."

"You love Ted and Rone--I suppose--and yet you nag them."

"Oh. Well. That. That's different. Besides, I don't nag 'em. Not what
you'd call nagging. But zize saying: Now, here's Paul, the nicest,
most sensitive critter on God's green earth. You ought to be ashamed of
yourself the way you pan him. Why, you talk to him like a washerwoman.
I'm surprised you can act so doggone common, Zilla!"

She brooded over her linked fingers. "Oh, I know. I do go and get
mean sometimes, and I'm sorry afterwards. But, oh, Georgie, Paul is so
aggravating! Honestly, I've tried awfully hard, these last few years, to
be nice to him, but just because I used to be spiteful--or I seemed so;
I wasn't, really, but I used to speak up and say anything that came
into my head--and so he made up his mind that everything was my fault.
Everything can't always be my fault, can it? And now if I get to
fussing, he just turns silent, oh, so dreadfully silent, and he
won't look at me--he just ignores me. He simply isn't human! And he
deliberately keeps it up till I bust out and say a lot of things I don't
mean. So silent--Oh, you righteous men! How wicked you are! How rotten
wicked!"

They thrashed things over and over for half an hour. At the end, weeping
drably, Zilla promised to restrain herself.

Paul returned four days later, and the Babbitts and Rieslings went
festively to the movies and had chop suey at a Chinese restaurant.
As they walked to the restaurant through a street of tailor shops and
barber shops, the two wives in front, chattering about cooks, Babbitt
murmured to Paul, "Zil seems a lot nicer now."

"Yes, she has been, except once or twice. But it's too late now. I
just--I'm not going to discuss it, but I'm afraid of her. There's
nothing left. I don't ever want to see her. Some day I'm going to break
away from her. Somehow."

 Much to Babbitt's dismay, Ted is struggling in school. Moreover, Ted's relationship with Eunice Littlefield, a carefree girl with a deep passion for the movies, is beginning to worry him. In contrast, he happily observes the relationship between Verona and Escott in the hopes of finding signs of a budding romance. Babbitt wants Ted to go to law school, but Ted is interested in girls and mechanics. He even builds a car from spare parts and sells it for a profit. When Ted throws a party, Babbitt is greatly disturbed to discover that the teenagers are smoking and drinking in secret. Moreover, they exhibit looser standards regarding the relations between the sexes than Babbitt's generation. When Howard Littlefield checks on the party, he is horrified to see Eunice and Ted dancing so close together. He drags Eunice from the party, and the relationship between his family and the Babbitts cools. After the guests depart, the Babbitts argue about the party. A visit from his mother and half-brother Martin's family increases Babbitt's growing irritation with family matters. Babbitt's mother and his brother do not understand the modern city life that Babbitt leads. Moreover, Myra's parents move into a hotel, so the Babbitts are obligated to have dinner with them every other Sunday. An illness in February gives Babbitt some relief from the incessant demands of his family. Babbitt suddenly realizes that his entire life is "incredibly mechanical" and wishes he didn't have to return to work. Babbitt uses insider information Prout gave him in return for his campaign work to extort a high price for some land the Street Traction Company needs to build repair shops. The purchasing agent, the vice president, and the president of the company vigorously protest the exorbitant price, but a compromise that benefits everyone is reached. Babbitt's profit comes to three thousand dollars. Several customers complain about Graff's dishonesty in dealing with them, so Babbitt, horrified to have a dishonest employee, lectures Graff about ethics and fires him. Graff protests Babbitt's hypocrisy and threatens to reveal the details of Babbitt's shady deals if Babbitt tries to make it difficult for him to get a job in another firm. Babbitt decides to take Ted with him on a short business trip to Chicago. They enjoy themselves immensely while discussing the excruciating pace of Verona and Escott's courtship, but Babbitt feels lonely and depressed when Ted returns to Zenith for school. By accident, Babbitt encounters Sir Gerald Doak, who is feeling just as bored and lonely. At first, Babbitt is intimidated by the British aristocrat, but he finds that they are a lot alike. They go to a movie and spend the night drinking together in Doak's hotel room. Babbitt's good cheer is destroyed when he spies Riesling, who is supposed to be in Akron, having dinner with a strange woman. Riesling reluctantly introduces Babbitt to May Arnold and tries to dissuade Babbitt from visiting him later that evening. Babbitt insists on waiting for him at his hotel later that night. He bullies the hotel clerk into giving him the key to Riesling's room. He is stricken with an irrational fear that Riesling has committed suicide, but to his relief, the room is empty. When Riesling returns to his hotel room three hours later, Babbitt criticizes him for having an affair because it will harm Riesling's social standing in Zenith. Riesling complains that Zilla makes him miserable, so he sees nothing wrong with taking refuge in the arms of another woman. Babbitt stops in Akron to mail a postcard to Zilla stating that he saw Riesling there. He visits Zilla as soon as he returns to Zenith to further strengthen his lie, but Zilla is still convinced that Riesling has been seeing another woman. Babbitt defends his friend and urges Zilla to be nicer to him. Although Zilla does improve, Riesling confesses to Babbitt that it is too late to change how he feels.

