Chapter 5 of 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 McGowan. What time are you going to lunch? Well, make sure Miss Banigan is in then. Explain to her that if one felt calls up, she's to tell him I'm already having this title traced. And oh, by the way, remind me tomorrow to have peniment and trace it.  If you need me, I'll be at the athletic club and I'll be back by two. He dusted the scar 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 nudes now he had placed the same letter on the unfinished pile. He scrawled on a sheet of yellow backing paper, the memorandum, Z-About Apartment H-D-R-S, 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.  He courageously returned the scar box to the correspondence file, locked it up, hit the key in a more difficult place and raged, ought to take care of it myself, need more exercise, want to the club every single noon. Just what I'll do, cut out this motoring all the time. The resolution made him feel exemplatory immediately after 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. As he drove he glanced with 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 babbit, 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 Shoeshine parlor, a one-story hut which beside the granite and red brick ponderness of the old California building resembled a bath house under a cliff, he commented, Barsh, ought to get my shoes shined this afternoon. Keep forgetting it. At the Simplix office furniture shop, the National Cadge Register Agency, he yearned for a dictant fall for a typewriter, which would add and multiply as a poet yearns for quattros or a physician for radium. At the Newby Men's Ware 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 him, too, by golly. And at the United Cigar Store, with its crimson and gold alertness, he reflected, I wonder if he needs some cigars. Idiot! Plum forgot. Gonna 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 discovery, while across town traffic limousines and enormous moving vans and insistent motorcycles poured by. On the further 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, Hey! How are you, Georgie? Babbit 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 Zemath of 1885. While he was passing the five-and-tenth-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 land deal, but taxes due. Let's see, hot to pull out eight thousand net this year, and save fifteen hundred of that? No, not if I put up the garage and let's see, six hundred and forty clear last month, and twelve times six forty makes makes. Let's see, six times twelve is seventy two hundred, and our rats anyway. I'll make eight thousand. You know, that's not so bad, mighty good fellows pulling down eight thousand dollars a year. Eight thousand good hard iron dollars. But there isn't more than five percent of the people in the whole United States that make more than Uncle George does by going right up at the top of the heap, but my expenses are family waste and gasoline, all he'd dress like millionaires and send in that eighty a month the mother, and all these sternographers 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 perisly 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, you had some sort of old print near pay for itself and matches, eh? It was a pretty thing, a nickel cylinder, with an almost silvery socket, to be attached to the dashboard of his car. It was not only a supplacate on the counter observed, a dandy little refinement lending the last touch of class to the 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 saved ten minutes. As he drove on, he glanced at it. Very nice, all his wanted one, said wistfully. The one thing a smoker needs, too. Then he remembered that he had given up smoking. Darn it! Mourned. Oh, well, I guess I'll hit a cigar once in a while and be a great convenience for other folks. Might make just a difference in getting chummy with some fellow that would put over sale and certain looks nicer, certainly a mighty clever little jigger. Gives the last touch of refinement and class, and I'm by golly, I guess I can afford it if I want to. Not going to be the only member of this family 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. 3. 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 gymnasium, a tenth of the members radically try to reduce. But most of its three thousand members use it as a café 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 67% resigned from the athletic and thereafter heard to say in a drowsy sanctity of the Union Lounge, oh, the athletic would be a pretty good hotel if it were more exclusive. The athletic club building is nine stories high, yellow brick with glossy roof garden above the portico of huge limestone columns below. The lobby with its thick pillars of porous canine stone is pointed vaulting and a brown glazed tile floor, like well-baked breadcrust is the combination of cathedral crypt and ratskeller. The members rush into the lobby as though they were shopping and had much time for it. Thus did Babbit enter, and to the group standing by the cigar counter he whooped, How's the boys? How's the boys? Well, well, fine day. Jovally they were back, Virgil Gunch, the co-dealer. Sidney Finkelstein, the lady's ready to wear a buyer for Parcher and Stern's department store, and Professor Joseph K. Pumpery, owner of the right-way business college and instructor in public speaking, business English, scenario writing, and commercial law. Though Babbit admired this savant and appreciated Sidney Finkelstein as a mighty smart buyer and a good liberal spender, it was to Virgil Gunch that he turned with enthusiasm. Mr. Gunch was the 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 unofficial than esteemed leading knight in the benevolent and protective order of the 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 chuminess 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 Booster Club lunches to give the boys a free entertainment. He was a large man with hair and bras, and he knew the latest jokes. But he played poker close to the chest. It was at his party that Babbit had sucked in the virus of today's restlessness. Gunch shot it. How was the old Bolshevsky? How do you feel the morning after the night before?  Hope you haven't forgotten I took that last cute little jackpot, Babbit bellowed. He was three feet from Gunch. That's all right now. What I'll hand you next time, Georgie, say. Did you notice in the paper the way the New York Assembly stood up to the Reds? You bet I did. That was fine, nice day to day. Yes, it's one mighty fine spring day, but night's still cold. Yeah, you're right, they are. Had to have a couple blankets last night on the sleeping-ports. Say, said Babbit, turned to Finkelstein, the buyer. Got something to 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, Pumperoy, a bulbous man with a pepper and salt cut away in a pipe working voice, commented, that's a dandy accessory. Cigarette lighter gives tone to the dashboard. Yep, finally decided to buy me one. Got the best on the market, clerk said it was, paid five bucks for it. Just wondering if it got stuck. Well, they charged for a mature store, said. Finkelstein asserted that five dollars was not too great a sum, not for a really high-class lighter which was subtly nickled and provided with connections of the very best quality. I always say, and believe me, I'm based 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 could get cheap junk, but in the long run the cheapest thing is the best you can get. Now, you take this the other day, I got a new top from Old Boat in 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 upstate and they simply can't get on to the way a cityfellows mind works.  But I don't figure I was stuck. George, not a bit. Machine looks brand new. Not that it's so darned old, of course. It's had less than three years. But I give it a hard service. Never drive less than a hundred miles on Sunday. Oh, I really don't think you got stuck, George. In the long run the best is, you might say, it's unquestionably the cheapest. That's right, said Virgil Gunge. That's the way I look at it.  Babbit nodded his head at every fifth word in the roaring rhythm and the conclusion in Gunge's renowned humorous vein. He was enchanted. Still attached, George? Don't know as you can afford it. I've heard your business is kind of under the eye of the government since you stole the tale of, uh, Ethorn Park and sold it.  But when it comes to kidding how about this report that you stole the black marble depths off the post office and sold them for a high grade coal? In delight, Babbit patted Gunge's back and 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 I'll hold you for a while, Georgie, said Finkelstein. I'll tell you, though, boys, what I did here, George's Mrs, went into the gents' wear department at Partures to buy him some colors and before she could give his neck size, the clerk slipped her some sirt-teens. How'd you know the size? says Miss Babbit. And the clerk says, men that let their wives buy colors for him always wear thirteen, madam. How's that? That's pretty good, eh? How's that, eh? I guess that'll about fiction, George. Babbit sought for amicable insults and answer. He stopped, stared at the door. Paul Reisling was coming in. Babbit 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 Lighty Peri-conference, nor the blurring good-fellow, the Joshua and regular guy of the athletic club. He was an older brother to Paul Reisling. Swift to defend him admiring him with 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, thee? All right, I guess.  I'm first-rate, you second-hand hunk of cheese. Reassured thus of their fondness.  Reisling slapped, Well, you're lucky to have a chance to have lunch with a gentleman. They grinned and went into the norween washroom, where a line of men bent over the bulls insert along a prestigious slab of marble, as in religious prostitution before their own images, in the massy mirror. Voices thick, satisfied, authoritative, hurled along the marble walls, bounded from the ceiling of lavender-colored 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-Vodville Theatre this week certainly are a slick pair of actors. Babbit, though ordinarily his voice was the surest and most episcopal of all, was silent, in the presence of the slight dark reticence of Paul Reisling. 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 two-door-ledded casements and Oriole, a somewhat musicianless musician's gallery and tapestries believed to illustrate the granting of Magna Carta. The open beams had been hand-as'd by Jake Offit's Car Body Works. The hinge were of hand-wrought iron. The waistcoat 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 not only to be 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. Babbit usually sat at the one near the door, with a group including Gunsch, Finkelstein, Professor, Pumphery, Howard Littlefield, his neighbor T. Carmelty Fink, 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. Then merrily called themselves the Roughnecks. Today, as he passed their table, the Roughnecks greeted him. "'Wass it down! You and Paul are too proud to feed with poor folks? Afraid somebody might stick you for a bottle of bevo? George strikes me as 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 musician's gallery. He felt guilty. At the Zenith Athletic Club, privacy was very bad for him. 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, uh, 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 until Babbit was thick and disconsolate with mutton grease that he flung out, "'I wound up a nice little deal with Conrad Lighty this morning and, uh, put five hundred good plunks in my pocket. Pretty nice, pretty nice. Yet, I don't know what's the matter with me today. Maybe it's an attack of spring fever or staying up too late at Verge Gunches, or maybe it's just the winter's work piling up. But I felt kind of down in the mouth all day long. Of course, I wouldn't beef about it to fellows at the rough next 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 do. Supporting my family, got a good house, and a six-owner car. Built up a nice little business. I have any vices, especially except smoking, and I'm practically cutting that one 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 drawn out, broken by shouts from the neighboring tables by mechanical love-making to the waitresses, by strenuous 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 fault. 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 know what my own life's been. I know, man. I ought to have been a fiddler, and I'm a peddler of tar-roofing. And Zilia. 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 man her? 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'll tell ya, I'm a lady, dammit.  Well, she keeps elbowing through the crowd, me after her, feeling good and ashamed till she's almost up at the velvet rope and ready to be next let in. But there was a little squirt of a man there, probably been waiting half an hour. I kind of admire the little cuss. And he turns to Zilia and says, perfect a plight. 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 whores, Paul, this person insulted me. In the poor skate, he got ready to fight. I made out, I hadn't hurt him. Sure, same as you wouldn't hear a boiler factory, and 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 Zilia went right on talking about the little chap, and screeching that folks like him ought 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 in? Well, 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 you, because anybody else would think I was yellow. Maybe I am. Don't carry longer. Gosh. You've had to stand a lot of whining for me. First and last, Georgie. Rats. Now, Paul, you'll never really what you could call whined. Sometimes I'm always blowing on Myra and the kids about that wail of a realtor I am, and yet sometimes I get a snickin' idea I'm not such a peer-point Morgan as I let on to be. But if I ever do help by jawing you along, ol' Paul Insky, I guess maybe St. Pete may let me in after all. Yeah, you're, uh, blow hard, Georgie. You cheerful cutthroat. But you certainly kept me going. Well, why don't you divorce Celia? 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-centred 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 have 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 make in love with somebody. Fat chance, of course. She'll flirt with anything, but you know how she holds her 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.  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 don't think you were that kind of a person. They talk about the demiverges of stories. They watch? But the wise hard consort at old married women like Zilia are worse than any bobbed-hair girl that ever went boldly out in this here storm of life and kept her umbrellas slit up her sleeve. But rats, you know what Zilia 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 what I get sore and try to have it out on her what 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 means. I'll tell you, Georgie. You know my taste or pretty fairly simple in a matter of food, at least. Courses you're always complaining I do like decent cigars, not those florody cabagos you're smoking. That's all right now. That's good too, for by the way, Paul, did I tell you I decided to practically cut out smoke? 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 Zilia because she's so rotten, bad tempered that the cook has quit.  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. What do 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 businessmen to be strictly moral, as an example to the community. In fact, you're so earnest about morality, old George, that I hate to think how essentially immoral you must be underneath. All right, you can wait, wait, wait, now what?  And business, the roofing business, roofs for cow sheds. Oh, I don't mean I haven't had a lot of fun out in the game, out of putting it over on the labor unions and seeing the 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 as with you. All we do is cut each other's throat and make the public pay for it.  Oh yes, of course, I don't really exactly mean that. Suppose, of course, competition brings out the best, survival of the fittest, but, but I mean, take all those fellows we know that kind right here in the club, now that seem to be perfectly content with their home life and their businesses, and that boosts Zenith and the Chamber of Commerce and the Hall and Firm million population. I bet if you could cut into their heads, you'd find that one-third of them are sure enough satisfied with their wives and kids and friends in 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 with 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 go. Why do you suppose there's so many mysterious suicides? Why do you suppose so many substantial citizens jump right into the war? Think it was all patriotism? Babbit stored it. What do you expect? Think we were sending to the world to have a soft time, and what is it? Float on flowery beds of eaves? Think man was made just to be happy? Why not? Though I've never discovered anybody that knew what that deuce man really was made for. Well, you 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 it's nothing but a, well, he's simply a weakling, molly-cattle, 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's right man has, and I don't know the solutions afford him. 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 admitted. 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 elvenlycy 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 in 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. Have it too strong. But Georgie, I've been thinking of one mild bat, oh, don't worry old pillar of monogany. It's highly proper. It seems to be settled now, isn't it? Though of course Zillia keeps rooting for a nice expensive vacation in New York and Atlantic City with the bright lights and the bootleg cocktails and a bunch of lounge lizards to dance with. But the Babbitts and the Rieslings are sure enough going to Lake Sunosquam, 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 with other 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 plustered. Why don't we just put our foot down and say, we're going ahead of you, and that's all there is to it. Nothing criminal in it, simply say to Zilia. Don't say anything to Zilia 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 Zilia 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 duckpins. During the game of duckpins, 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 McGowan he would be back. Paul sighed, look here, old man. Aughton to talk about Zilia the way I did. Rats, old man, lifts off steam.   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 sure, of course, I'll need you to advise me on the roof of the building. And the old deal will fall through, and there'll be nothing for us but to go on ahead to Maine. I, uh, 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 need me, I'd chuck it and come out for you every time. Not, of course, but what you're, of course, I don't mean you'd ever do anything that would put, uh, that would be, uh, put a decent position on the frits, but, you know what I mean? I'm kind of a clumsy old codger, and I need your fine Ialichian hand. Oh, hell, I can't stand here gassing all day on the job. So don't take any wooden nickels, polybots. See you soon. So long. Chapter Six of Babbit. This sleeper-box recording is in the public domain, recording by Mike Vendetti, mikevendetti.com. Babbit by Sinclair Lewis, Chapter Six. He forgot Paul Riseling 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'm gonna quit smoking so blame much. The ramble discussion of every detail of the cigar lighter led them to speak of electric flat irons and bed warmers. Babbit apologized for being so shabbily old-fashioned as still to use a hot water bottle, and he announced that he would have this 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, oxediline 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, calamine doors, and seven eighth inch blind nailed flooring. Began those diplomacy of hurt surprise and readiness to be persuaded to do something they had already decided to do, which would someday result in a sale. On the way back, Babbit 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 Fahalo 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 sidetracks, 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 Lyndon Lane Cemetery. They drove on to the Ziko Motor Company and interviewed the sales manager, Noel Ryland, about a discount on a Ziko car for Thompson. Babbit and Ryland were fellow members of the Boosters Club, and no booster felt right. He bought anything from another booster without receiving a discount.  I'm not going to crawl around mooching discounts, not from nobody! It was one of the differences between Thompson, the old-fashioned lean-yanky, rugged, traditional stage-tripe of American businessman and Babbit, the Plump, smooth, efficient, up-to-the-minute and otherwise perfected modern. Whenever Thompson twanged, put your John Hancock on that line! Babbit 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 aesthetic 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 Reisling, these old codgers lack the subtlety that you have to have to date. This advance in civilization could be carried too far, Babbit perceived. Noel Ryland's sales manager of the Ziko was a frivolous graduate of Princeton, while Babbit was a sound and standard wear from the 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 pockets 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 evangelicals' churches, and domestic brightness and sound business, were Babbit 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.  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. Somehow, today, I don't feel like going back to work. Oh, well. Two. 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 Graf. Young Graf, the outside salesman, was always hinting that he deserved an increase of commission. And today he complained, I think I ought to get a bonus if I put through the healer sale. I'm chasing around and working on it every single evening, almost. Babbit frequent where he marked to his wife that it was better to con your office help along and keep him happy instead of jumping on him and poking him up. Get more work out of him that way. But this unexampled lack of appreciation hurt him, and he turned on Graf. 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 list 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 Babbit Thompson listings. You say you're engaged to a girl, but have to put in your evenings chasing for buyers. Well, why the devil shouldn't you? What do you want to do? Sit around holding your 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?  Graf was not so amiable 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 heller house is a terror. Nobody'll fall for it.  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 of 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 feelings and be unjust to Peneman 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, eh? How about it? Oh, well, gee, of course. Sidecraft as he went out crab-wise. Babbit 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 Skigrid Purse that he was frightened into a 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 the self-approval that he wondered whether he had been entirely just. After all, Stan and the boy any more ought 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 has soar. Gee, saying to McGowan 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 McGowan and Miss Banigan would do well to be there early, and for heaven's sake remind him to call up Cornell Lighty. So as 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 McGowan, stammering with head lifted from her typing. Miss Banigan looking over her ledger. Matt Peneman craning around at his desk in the dark alcove. Stanley Graff sullenly expressionless, as a parvo before the bleak promontory of his butler. He hated to expose his back to their laughter, and in his efforts to be casually merry, he stammered and was rackiously friendly and oozed wretchedly out 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. Three. He stopped to inform Howard Littlefield, his scholarly neighbor, that though the day had been spring-light, the evening might be cold. He went in to shout, Where are you? and 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 dress making scissors. He informed Ted that it was all nonsense having a furnace man.  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 outside ways for two minutes, up for two minutes, while he muttered, Take more exercise, keep in shape. Then went in to see whether his caller needed changing before dinner. As usual, it apparently did not. The lettice croit made a powerful woman beat the dinner gong. The roast 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 Reisling and the proven merits of the new cigar lighter, he was moved to a benign, sort of thinking about buying 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, I don't know about that. I kind of like an open car. You get more fresh air that way. Oh, shoot. Just because you've 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. Babbit. You don't get your hair all blown to pieces, from Verona. That's a lot sportier, from Ted. And from Tink of the Youngest. Oh, let's have a sedan. Mary Ellen's father had got one. Ted wound up. Oh, everybody's got a closed car now, except us. Babbit faced them. I guess you've got nothing very terrible to complain about, anyway.  And I like an open car, so you can put the top down on summer evenings and go out for a drive, get some good fresh air. Besides, closed car costs more money. Ah, gee whiz, if the D'Lapidore's gonna afford a closed car, I guess we can, brought it, Ted. I make 8,000 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 a door and some thoroughness into the matters of streamlined 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 nightly rank. In the city of Zenith, in the barbarous 20th century, a family motor indicated its social rank as precisely as the grades of the prairies determined the rank of an English family, indeed more precisely. Considering the opinion of old country families upon newly created brewery barons in Woollett Mill viscans, the details of precedence were never officially determined.  But of the respective social importance, there was no doubt, and where Babbot as a boy had aspired to the presidency, his son aspired to a Packard twin six, and an established position in the motor gentry. The favor which Babbot had won from his family by speaking of a new car evaporated, as they realized he didn't intend to buy one this year. Ted lamented, punk, your boat looks as if it had fleas and been scratching its varnish off. Mrs. Babbot said abstractively, it's no way to talk your father. Babbot raged, if you're too much of a high-class gentleman and you'll belong to the Bonton 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 Babbot 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'll get to scrapping this way.  Paul, Main, were old pants and loaf and cuss. You said cautiously to his wife. I've been in correspondence with a man in New York, wants to see him about a real estate trade. May not come off till summer. Hope it doesn't break just when we and the Riesling get together to go to Main. Be ashamed. Couldn't make the trip there together. Well, no use worrying now. Perone escaped immediately after dinner with no discussion, save and automatic. Why don't you ever stay home, from Babbot? 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-bins, he protested. I guess I could stand 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 them. These teachers, how did they get that way? Mrs. Babbot, Darning Sock, 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 it much, but when I was young the girls used to show me passages that weren't really—they weren't at all nice. Babbot 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 plotted nightly through every picture and, during the write, 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 in 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 them into an up-to-date high school system like we have here 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 tall 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 especially. Honest, there's a lot of fellows that have graduated from colleges that don't even begin to make as much money as the fellows that went to work early, old shimmy Peters, that teaches Latin in the high. He thought, what is it from Columbia? And he sits up all night reading a lot of greasy books, and he's always spilling about the value of languages. And the poor soap doesn't even make but 1,800 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 cork and big garage, or else a fellow was telling me about it yesterday. I'd like to be one of those fellows that the Standard Oil Company sends out to China, and you live in a compound, and you 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 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 this. I clipped these 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 trouser pocket and the other extended with chiding forefinger. He was bewitching an audience of men with gray beard, ponches, 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 or maneuveria, but a roll of dollar signs that text ran, power and prosperity and public speaking, a yarn told at the club. Who do you think I ran into the other evening at that D. Luke's restaurant? Well, Freddie Durkey that used to be a dead or alive shipping clerk in my old place, Mr. Mausman, we used to laugh when we called 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 deluxe. And if he wasn't ordering a Tony feed with all the fixin' 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 Zion, he was bossing them around like he was a millionaire. I cautiously asked him what he was doing. Freddie laughed and said, Say, old chum, I guess you're wondering what's come over me. You'll be glad to know I am now an assistant super at the old shop, and right on high road to prosperity and domination. And I look forward with confidence to a 12-cylinder car, and the wife is making things hum in the best society in the kitties, 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 a big vocabulary, how to create a strong personality, how to become a rational, powerful, and original thinker, how to be a master man. W. F. Pete, author of the shortcut course in public speaking, is easily the foremost figure in practical literature, psychology, and oratory. A graduate of some of our leading universities, lecturer, extensive traveler, author of books, poetry, etc. A man with a 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 occupation. Here's how it happened. I ran across an ad of a course that claimed to teach people how to talk easily on their feet, and 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, and a seed inspiration, etc. It was compiled by the master orator, Professor Waldo F. Pete. 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're 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 practicing on the wipe. 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, oh, Doggle, 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 a circular, no obligation, and valuable free art picture too. Shortcut educational publishing company? Desk WA, San Pit, Iowa. Are you a 100%er or a 10%er? Babbitt was again without a cannon which would enable him to speak with authority. Nothing in motoring a real estate had indicated what a solid citizen and regular fellow ought to think about culture by mail. He began with hesitation. Well, sound as if it covered the ground certainly is a fine thing to be able to orate. I sometimes thought I had a little talent that way myself. And I know darn well that one reason why a four-flushing 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 dog-gone thing to say. And it certainly is pretty cute the way they get out all those courses on various topics and subjects nowadays. I'll tell you, though, no need to blow a lot of good money on this stuff when you can get a first-rate course in eloquence in English and all that right now in your own school. And one of the biggest school buildings in the entire country. That so? said Mrs. Babbitt comfortably while Ted complained. Yeah, but dad, they just teach a lot 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 someone passes a sliding 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 peoples have written saying that after a few lessons, they've out-boxed bigger and heavier opponents. The lessons start with simple movements practiced before your mirror, holding out your hand for a coin, the breaststroke and swimming, etc.  Oh, baby, maybe I wouldn't like that to have 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 catching me alone. Nonsense, the idea most use this thing I've ever heard of. Babbit, flimated. Well, just suppose I was walking with mom on her own and somebody passed a sliding remark or used improper language. What would I do? Well, you'd probably bust the record for the hundred-yard dash. I would not. I'd stand right up to any muckra that passed a sliding remark on my sister, and I'd show him. Look here, young Dempsey, if I ever catch you fighting a willy everlast in daylights out of you, and I'll do it without practice and holding out my hand for a coin before a mirror, too. Why, Ted dear, Mrs. Babbit said placidly, it's not at all nice you're talking of fighting this way. Well, gosh all money, that's a fine way to appreciate, and then suppose I was walking with you, mom, and somebody passed a sliding remark. Nobody's going to pass no sliding remarks on nobody, Babbit observed. None of they stay home and study their geometry and mind their own affairs instead of hanging out around a lot of pool rooms and soda fountains and places where nobody got any business to be. But, God, dad, if they did, Mrs. Babbit 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 have been insulted by any.  Just suppose. Can't you suppose something? Can't you imagine things? Certainly I can imagine things. The idea. Certainly, mother, can imagine things and suppose things. Think you're the only member of this household that's got imagination? Babbit 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 consider.  Realtor. Some realtor 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 on to the movies and running around with a lot of full girls with their dresses up to their knees and powdered and painted and rouged and God knows what all is if they were chorus girls, then you'd know. And you'd suppose that if there's any one thing I stand for in the real estate circles of Zenas, 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 other realtor, not even that dirty four-flesh and society-sneak Cecil Roundtree. But, and there's no if and or but about it. But if I were going to lambast somebody, I wouldn't require any fancy ducks or swimming strokes before a mirror or any of the do-dads of flip-flops.  Think you'd want to box and jump around like a dancing master? You'd just lame out cold, least I certain to hope any son of mine would.  And that's all there is to it. And you aren't going to have any boxing lessons by mail either. No, but yes, I just wanted to show how many different kinds of correspondence courses there are instead of all that camber they teach us in the high. But I thought they taught you boxing in the school gymnasium. That's different. They stick you up in some big stiff amuses himself pounding the stuffings out of you before you have a chance to learn. 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 18 a week in a barbershop, writes to us that since taking our course, he is now pulling down 5,000 as an osteovitalic physician. And the third that Ms. J.L., recently a rapper in a store, is now getting 10 real dollars a day teaching our Hindu system of vibratory breathing and mental control. Ted had collected 50 or 60 announcements from annual reference books from Sunday School Periodical fiction magazines and journals of discussion.  Be more popular and make more money. You can. You can lately or sing yourself into society by the secret principles of a newly discovered system of music teaching. Anyone, 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, coronet, clarinet, saxophone, violin or drum, and learn sight singing. The next under the wistful appeal. Finger print detectives wanted. Big income. 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 adventure spirit clave. 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 a fire-brick necklace. Wouldn't it be swell to travel everywhere and have some famous crook, whoop, Ted? Well, I don't think much of that. Dog gone likely to get hurt. Still, that music, Dutty Stunt, might be pretty fair, though. There's no reason why if the 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 practicing and exercising that get in music. Babbit was impressed, and he had a delightful parental feeling that they, too, the men of the family, understood each other. He listened to the notices of mailbox universities which taught short story writing, improving the memory, motion picture acting, and developing the soul power, banking and Spanish, chair-a-potty and photography, electrical engineering and window trimming, poultry raising and chemistry. Oh, well. Babbit sought for adequate expression of his admiration. I'm a son of a gun. I know this correspondence school business had become a mighty profitable game, makes suburban real estate look like two cents, but I didn't realize it had got to be such a key industry. Must rank right up there with groceries and movies. Always figured somebody come along with the brains not to 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 those courses might interest you. I must ask the fellow athletics if they ever realized. But same time, Ted, you know how advertisers, I mean some advertisers exaggerate. I don't know if they'd be able to jam you through those courses as fast as they claim they can. Oh, sure, Ted, of course. Ted had the immense and joyful maturity of a boy who is respectfully listened to by his elders. Babbit concentrated on him with grateful affection. I can see what an influence these courses might have on the whole educational works. Of course, I had never admitted publicly. Felt like self a state U graduate. It's only decent and patriotic for him to blow his horn and boost in all the matter. But smarter 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 as sent. I don't know, but what maybe these correspondence courses might prove to be one of the most important American inventions. Trouble a lot of folks, 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 airplane 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 dominating movements like efficiency and Rotarianism and prohibition and democracy are what compose our deepest and truest wealth. And maybe this new principle and education at home may be another way of be another factor. I'll tell you, Ted, we've got to have vision. I think those correspondence courses are terrible. The philosophers cast. It was Mrs. Babbitt who had made this discord in their spiritual harmony. And one of Ms. 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 these 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! You're 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 the swell Harvard dormitory with pictures and shields and table covers and no do-dads, do you? I'll 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 barbershops and factories into the professions. They're too crowded already. And what'll we do for work, man, 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 a Paul Reisling or even Dr. Howard Littlefield, he hit it. 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.  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, of course, I got my BA in sociology and all that junk. Oh, it puts an awful crimp in their style, but there wouldn't be any class to say, and I got the degree of sticker liquor from Benzos 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 and seniors at the clubs and so on, and I wouldn't want you to drop out of the gentleman class, the class that are just as red-blooded as common people, but still have power and personality. It would kind of hurt me if you did that, old man. I know, Dan, 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 your homework. Do it first thing in the morning. Well, six times in the past 60 days, babid had stormed. You will not do it first thing in the morning. You'll do it right now. But tonight, he said. Well, better hustle. His smile was the rare shy radiance he kept for Paul Reisling. Four. Ted's a good boy, he said to Miss Babbit. Oh, he is. Who these girls are going to pick up? Are they nice decent girls? I don't know, oh, dear. Ted never tells me anything anymore. I don't understand what's come over the children of this generation. I used to have to tell Papa and Mama everything. But it seems like the children today have just slipped away from all control. I hope they're decent girls. Of course, Ted's no longer a kid, and I wouldn't want him to get mixed up in everything. George, I wonder if you had not to take him aside and tell him about things? She blushed and lowered her eyes. I don't know. The way I figured, 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. Of course, Papa agrees with you. He says all this instruction is, he says, Tisn't decent. I don't, doesn't he? Well, let me tell you that whatever Henry T. Thompson thinks about morals, I mean though, of 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 in 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 to Henry T. Yes, sir, by golly, I'm going to take Ted aside and tell him why I lead strictly moral life. Well, will you? When? When? What's the use of trying to pin me down to when, why, and where, and how, and when? That's trouble with women. That's why they don't make a 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, was that Tinka horny upstairs? She ought to be asleep long ago. He prowled through the living room and stood in the sun-parler, that glass-walled room of wicker chairs and swinging couch in which they loafed on Sunday afternoons. Outside, only the lights of Doppelbrow's house and the dim present of Babbit's favorite elm broke the softness of April night. Good business with the void, getting over feeling cranky the way I did this morning, and restless. Though by golly, I will have a few days alone with Paul in Maine, and at Devil's Zilla. But that's all right. Whole family's all right. And good business. Now, how many fellas make four hundred and fifty bucks, practically a half of a thousand dollars easy as I did today? Maybe when we all get to rowing, it's just as much my fault as it is theirs. Hard to get grouchy like it do, but wish I'd been a pioneer. Same as my granddad. Then wouldn't have a house like this. Oh, gosh, I don't know. He thought mootily of Paul riseling of their youth together, of the girls they had known. When Babbit 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 and hash. The lively Paul Riseling, who was going off to Europe to study by a lint 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. Babbit's evenings were barren then, and he found comfort only in Paul's second cousin, Ira Thompson, a sleek and gentle girl, who showed her capacity by agreeing with the ardent young Babbit that, of course, he was going to be governor some day. Whereas Zilla mocked him as a country boy, Ira said indignantly that he was ever so much soldier than the young Dandies, who had been born in the great city of Zenith, an ancient settlement in eighteen ninety-seven, one hundred and five years old, with two hundred thousand population, the queen and wonder of all the state, and to the catawabba boy, George Babbit, 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 him. He knew that if he was to study law he could not marry for years, and Ira 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 inactitudes 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 Zilia.  And she raised her head to say, trustingly, Now that we're engaged shall we be married? Sooner shall we wait. Engaged! It was his first hint of it. His affection for this brown, tender woman 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 burning out that he didn't love her. He himself had no doubt, the evening before his marriage was an agony, and the morning wild with a 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 an 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, Babbit reflected, standing in the dark sun parlor. But I wish I could have had a whirl at law and politics, seen what I could do. Well, maybe I've made more money than it is. He returned to the living room, but before he settled down, he smoothed his wife's hair. She glanced up, happy and somewhat surprised. Chapter 7 of Babbit 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 woman's magazine. The room was very still. It was a room which observed the best floral height standards. The gray walls were divided into artificial paneling by strips of white enameled pine. From the Babbit's former house had come too much carved rocking chairs. But the other chairs were new, very deep and restful, upholstered in blue and gold stripped velvet. A blue velvet davidport, faced a fireplace and behind it was a cherry wood 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 davidport, a mahogany table real or imitation, and a piano lamp or 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 Babbit saved 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 Babbit had always been rather suspicious, and a hand-colored photograph of a colonial room, rag rug, maiden spinning, cat de mure before a white fireplace. Nineteen out of every twenty houses in floral heights had either a hunting print, a madame fagelatorre de 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 Babbit'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 unsoffened by downy ashes or sooty brick. The brass-fire irons were of immaculate polish, and the grenadier and irons 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, say, Tinkup. 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.  Two. At home, Babbot 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 was 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's pocket, jingled his silver, whirled the cigar-cutter and 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 sealed, brown, shaped like medieval shoes. He brought up an apple from the barrel which stood by the trunk closet in the basement. Apple Day keeps the doctor away. He enlightened Mrs. Babbot for quite the first time in fourteen hours. That's all. An apple is nature's best regulator. Yes, it. Trouble of women is they never have sense enough to form regular habits. Why? Always nibbling and eating between meals. George, she looked up from her reading, did you have a light lunch today like you were going to? I did. This malicious and unprovoked attack astounded him. Well, maybe it wasn't light as went to lunch with Paul and didn't have much chance to die it.  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. She stooped over her story while he piously sliced and gulped down the apple. Discoursing. One thing I've done, cut down with smoking. Had kind of a run-in with Graff in the office he'd 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 to get off. Funny kind of day makes me feel restless. Well, the sleepiest sound in the world, the terminal yawn. Mrs. Babbitt yawned with it and looked graceful as he droned. How about going to bed, eh? Don't suppose Roan and Ted will be in till all hours. Yep, funny kind of day, not terribly warm but yet. Gosh, I'd like someday 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 the doors and tried the windows and set the heat regulators so that the furnace drafts would open automatically in the morning he sighed a little heavily with the 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 his great treacherous day of veiled rebellions. Three. Before breakfast he always reverted to upstate 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 thriftly got ahead in those dismal duties.  He may be viewed to-night as a plump, smooth, pink, baldish, poggie, good man, robbed of the importance of spectacles, squatting in breast-high water, scrapping his lather smear cheeks with a safety razor, like a tiny lawnmower, 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 rick of lines, which slipped with a green sparkle over the curving porcelain as the clear water trembled. Babbit lazily watched it. Noted that along the silhouette of his legs against the radiance on the bottom of the tub, the shadows of air bubbles clinging to the hairs were reproduced as strange jungle mosses. He patted the water, and 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 drainpipe was dripping a dulcet and lively song. Trippity, drip, dribble, drippity, drip, drip. He was enchanted by it. He looked at the solid tub, the beautiful nickel tabs, the tiled walls of the room, and felt virtuous in the possession of this splendor. He roused himself and spoke roughly to his bad thing. Come here, you've done enough fooling. He reproved the treacherous soap, and to find the scratchy nail-brace with all you would, would you? He soaped himself and rinsed himself, and austerily 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 magnificent ying 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 Prefect Spaterian Church determined his every religious belief, and the senators who controlled the Republican Party, decided in the 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, fixed what he believed to be individuality, these standard advertised wares, toothpaste, 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 blanket's head 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 night rang veral power. But there was yet need of courage, as he sank into sleep just at the first exquisite relaxation. The doppleroo 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 in the driveway. The car door opened and bang shut. Then garage door slid open. Grading 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.  Instantly for Babbitt, a blessed state of oblivion. Four. At that moment in the city of Zenith, Horace Uptike was making love to Lucille McCleverly, in their mauve drawing room on Royal Ridge. After the return from a lecture by the imminent English novelist Uptike was Zenith's professional bachelor, a slim wasted man of forty-six, with an infeminate voice in taste and flowers, cretones, and flappers. Mrs. McCleverly was red-haired, creamy, discontented, exquisite, rude, and honest. Uptike tried his invariable first maneuver, touching her nervous wrist.  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 podal, and the Ming platter he had found in Vancouver.  And at that moment in Zenith, a cocaine runner and a prostitute were drinking cocktails in Healy Hanson Saloon on Front Street. Since national prohibition was now enforced and since Zenith was notoriously law-abiding, they were compelled to keep cocktails innocent by drinking them out of teacups. The lady threw her cup at the cocaine runner's head. He worked his revolver out of the pocket and he sleep and casually murder her. At that moment in Zenith, two men sat in a laboratory. For 37 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 12,000 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 jerk, and one a Russian Jewish actor. The Russian Jew quoted Kosti, Jean 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 bathtub, never read any books 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 Pulmore 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 the cinder-line yard, switched tracks, and armed guards, armed patrol. At that moment Mike Mundy was finishing a meeting Mr. Mundy. The distinguished evangelist, the best known Protestant Potiphan 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. He had been well-earned for, to quote his last report, Reverend Mr. Mundy, the prophet with a punch, has shown that he is the world's greatest sailman in 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 ahead. Of the larger cities of the land only Zenith had hesitated to submit its vices to Mike Mundy, 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.  This opposition had been crushed when the Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce had reported to a committee of manufacturers that in every city he had appeared Mr. Mundy 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 fairgrounds a Mike Mundy tabernacle had been erected. To seat fifteen thousand people. In it the Prophet was at this moment concluding his message. There are a lot of smart college professors and tea-guzzling slobs in this burg that say I'm a roughneck and a never was-er, 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.  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.  Only if they do, if they do, don't faint with surprise if some of them whose rum-dumb liars get one good swift poke from Mike, with all the kick of God's flaming righteousness behind the wop. Well, come on, folks, who says it? Who says Mike Mundy is a foreflesh and a yahoo? Huh? I didn't see anybody standing up. Well, there you are. Now I guess the folks in this town will quit listening to all the kuyoting 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. 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 Senka Don, the radical lawyer, and Dr. Kurt Yakovic, 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 Don's library. Zenith's a city with gigantic power, gigantic buildings, gigantic machines, gigantic transportation, meditated Don.  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, Don Rouse, I'm hanged if it is.   Is anything more standardized in 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 even song at the same Grey Stone Church with a square tower and every golfing-prig in Harris Tweed saying, right you are, to every other prosperous ass, yet I love England. And for standardization, look at the sidewalk cafes in France and the love-making in Italy. Standardization is excellent, per se. When I buy an Inglesaw 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 Line snowy street of these new houses, Georgian some of them, or with low raking roofs, the kind of street you'd find here in Siena, same floral heights, open trees, grass, and I was homesick. There's no other country in the world that has such pleasant homes and I don't care if they are standardized. It's a quarking standard. No, what I fight in Siena is standardization of thought and of course the traditions of competition. The real villains of the peace are the clean, kind, industrious family men who use every known brand of trickery and cruelty to ensure the prosperity of their cubs. The worst thing about these fellows is that they're so good and their work at least so intelligent.  Then this boasting, sneakingly, I have a notion that Siena is a better place to live in than Manchester or Glasgow or Lyons or Berlin or Turin. It is not and I have lived in most of them. Demerred Dr. Yavitch. Well matter of taste personally I prefer a city with a future so unknown that it excites my imagination.   Six. At that moment in Siena, Jake Offit, the politician, and Henry T. Thompson were in conference. Offit suggested, the thing to do is get your full son-in-law Babbit to put it over. He's one of those patriotic guys. When he grabs a piece of property for the gang, he makes it look like we were dying of love for the dear people. And I do love to buy respectability, reasonable. Wonder how long we can keep it up, Hank?  There's swell picking for an honest politician here, Hank. A whole city working to provide cigars and fried chickens and dried martinis for us and rallying to our banner with indignation, old, fierce indignation whenever some squealer like this fellow Seneca Dome 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 moving for it. But detraction 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 Dome out of town. Tamer 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 track, a young man who for six months had sought work, turned on the gas and killed himself and his wife. At that moment Lloyd Malham, the poet, owner of the Haffetz Bookshop, was finishing a rendezvous 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 pondersly in bed, to last turn, signifying that he'd had enough of this worried business of falling asleep, and was about to end earnest. Instantly he was in the magic dream. He was somewhere among unknown people who laughed at him. He slipped away, ran down the path 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 littered.