Babbitt quotes

The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods.

They were neither citadels nor churches, but frankly and beautifully office-buildings.

His name was George F. Babbitt.

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

His large head was pink, his brown hair thin and dry. His face was babyish in slumber, despite his wrinkles and the red spectacle-dents on the slopes of his nose. He was not fat but he was exceedingly well fed;

Not till the rising voice of the motor told him that the Ford was moving was he released from the panting tension. He glanced once at his favorite tree, elm twigs against the gold patina of sky, and fumbled for sleep as for a drug.

He who had been a boy very credulous of life was no longer greatly interested in the possible and improbable adventures of each new day.

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

It was the best of nationally advertised and quantitatively produced alarm-clocks, with all modern attachments, including cathedral chime, intermittent alarm, and a phosphorescent dial. Babbitt was proud of being awakened by such a rich device.

Socially it was almost as creditable as buying expensive cord tires.

He sulkily admitted now that there was no more escape, but he lay and detested the grind of the real-estate business, and disliked his family, and disliked himself for disliking them.

he sat on the edge of the cot, running his fingers through his wild hair, while his plump feet mechanically felt for his slippers. He looked regretfully at the blanket—forever a suggestion to him of freedom and heroism.

He had bought it for a camping trip which had never come off.

It symbolized gorgeous loafing, gorgeous cursing, virile flannel shirts.

and in the midst his wife serenely trotted in, observed serenely, “Why Georgie dear, what are you doing? Are you going to wash out the towels? Why, you needn’t wash out the towels. Oh, Georgie, you didn’t go and use the guest-towel, did you?”

It is not recorded that he was able to answer.

For the first time in weeks he was sufficiently roused by his wife to look at her.

His second embellishment was combing and slicking back his hair. It gave him a tremendous forehead, arching up two inches beyond the former hairline. But most wonder-working of all was the donning of his spectacles.

There is character in spectacles⁠—the pretentious tortoiseshell, the meek pince-nez of the school teacher, the twisted silver-framed glasses of the old villager.

Babbitt’s spectacles had huge, circular, frameless lenses of the very best glass; the earpieces were thin bars of gold. In them he was the modern business man;

It had the air of being a very good room in a very good hotel. One expected the chambermaid to come in and make it ready for people who would stay but one night, go without looking back, and never think of it again.

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

The Babbitts’ house was five years old. It was all as competent and glossy as this bedroom. It had the best of taste, the best of inexpensive rugs, a simple and laudable architecture, and the latest conveniences.

The trim dining-room (with its admirable oak buffet, its leaded-glass cupboard, its creamy plaster walls, its modest scene of a salmon expiring upon a pile of oysters) had plugs which supplied the electric percolator and the electric toaster.

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

Often of a morning Babbitt came bouncing and jesting in to breakfast. But things were mysteriously awry today.

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

Verona giggled, momentary victor in the greatest of Great Wars, which is the family war.

Ted looked at her hopelessly, then shrieked at Tinka: “For the love o’ Pete, quit pouring the whole sugar bowl on your corn flakes!”

To George F. Babbitt, as to most prosperous citizens of Zenith, his motor car was poetry and tragedy, love and heroism.

The office was his pirate ship but the car his perilous excursion ashore.

To George F. Babbitt, as to most prosperous citizens of Zenith, his motor car was poetry and tragedy, love and heroism.

The office was his pirate ship but the car his perilous excursion ashore.

Among the tremendous crises of each day none was more dramatic than starting the engine. It was slow on cold mornings; there was the long, anxious whirr of the starter;

Along the precise streets were still a few wooded vacant lots, and the fragment of an old orchard. It was brilliant today; the apple boughs were lit with fresh leaves like torches of green fire.

The first white of cherry blossoms flickered down a gully, and robins clamored.

Babbitt sniffed the earth, chuckled at the hysteric robins as he would have chuckled at kittens or at a comic movie.

Across the belt of railroad-tracks, factories with high-perched water-tanks and tall stacks-factories producing condensed milk, paper boxes, lighting-fixtures, motor cars. Then the business center, the thickening darting traffic, the crammed trolleys unloading, and high doorways of marble and polished granite.

It was big⁠—and Babbitt respected bigness in anything; in mountains, jewels, muscles, wealth, or words.

He was, for a spring-enchanted moment, the lyric and almost unselfish lover of Zenith. He thought of the outlying factory suburbs; of the Chaloosa River with its strangely eroded banks;

With front wheels nicking the wrought-steel bumper of the car in front, he stopped, feverishly cramped his steering-wheel, slid back into the vacant space and, with eighteen inches of room, manoeuvered to bring the car level with the curb.

It was a virile adventure masterfully executed.

With satisfaction he locked a thief-proof steel wedge on the front wheel, and crossed the street to his real-estate office on the ground floor of the Reeves Building.

but today it seemed flat—the tiled floor, like a bathroom, the ocher-colored metal ceiling, the faded maps on the hard plaster walls, the chairs of varnished pale oak, the desks and filing-cabinets of steel painted in olive drab.

It was a vault, a steel chapel where loafing and laughter were raw sin.

He hadn’t even any satisfaction in the new water-cooler! And it was the very best of water-coolers, up-to-date, scientific, and right-thinking. It had cost a great deal of money (in itself a virtue).

He was conscious of her as a girl, of black bobbed hair against demure cheeks.

A longing which was indistinguishable from loneliness enfeebled him.

While she waited, tapping a long, precise pencil-point on the desk-tablet, he half identified her with the fairy girl of his dreams. He imagined their eyes meeting with terrifying recognition; imagined touching her lips with frightened reverence and—She was chirping, “Any more, Mist’ Babbitt?”

He went through with it like the solid citizen he was: admitted the evils of tobacco, courageously made resolves, laid out plans to check the vice, tapered off his allowance of cigars, and expounded the pleasures of virtuousness to everyone he met.

He did everything, in fact, except stop smoking.

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

Conrad Lyte was a real-estate speculator. He was a nervous speculator. Before he gambled he consulted bankers, lawyers, architects, contracting builders, and all of their clerks and stenographers who were willing to be cornered and give him advice.

He was a bold entrepreneur, and he desired nothing more than complete safety in his investments, freedom from attention to details, and the thirty or forty percent profit which, according to all authorities, a pioneer deserves for his risks and foresight.

He was a stubby man with a cap-like mass of short gray curls and clothes which, no matter how well cut, seemed shaggy. Below his eyes were semicircular hollows, as though silver dollars had been pressed against them and had left an imprint.

He genially shook his fountain pen to make certain that it was flowing, handed it to Purdy, and approvingly watched him sign.

The work of the world was being done.

Lyte had made something over nine thousand dollars, Babbitt had made a four-hundred-and-fifty dollar commission, Purdy had, by the sensitive mechanism of modern finance, been provided with a business-building, and soon the happy inhabitants of Linton would have meat lavished upon them at prices only …

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

He fretted to Miss McGoun, “What time you going to lunch? Well, make sure Miss Bannigan is in then. Explain to her that if Wiedenfeldt calls up, she’s to tell him I’m already having the title traced.

And need more exercise—walk to the club, every single noon—just what I’ll do—every noon—cut out this motoring all the time.”

The resolution made him feel exemplary.

Immediately after it he decided that this noon it was too late to walk.

The resolution made him feel exemplary.

Immediately after it he decided that this noon it was too late to walk.

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

It was not only, as the placard on the counter observed, “a dandy little refinement, lending the last touch of class to a gentleman’s auto,” but a priceless time-saver.

By freeing him from halting the car to light a match, it would in a month or two easily save ten minutes.

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

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

Then he remembered that he had given up smoking.

“Darn it!” he mourned. “Oh well, I suppose I’ll hit a cigar once in a while. And—Be a great convenience for other folks. Might make just the difference in getting chummy with some fellow that would put over a sale. And—Certainly looks nice there.

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

The Zenith Athletic Club is not athletic and it isn’t exactly a club, but it is Zenith in perfection.

It has an active and smoke-misted billiard room, it is represented by baseball and football teams, and in the pool and the gymnasium a tenth of the members sporadically try to reduce.

… wainscot studded with handmade wooden pegs, and at one end of the room was a heraldic and hooded stone fireplace which the club’s advertising-pamphlet asserted to be not only larger than any of the fireplaces in European castles but of a draught incomparably more scientific.

It was also much cleaner, as no fire had ever been built in it.

Half of the tables were mammoth slabs which seated twenty or thirty men. Babbitt usually sat at the one near the door, with a group including Gunch, Finkelstein, Professor Pumphrey, Howard Littlefield, his neighbor, T.

Roofs for cowsheds! Oh, I don’t mean I haven’t had a lot of fun out of the Game; out of putting it over on the labor unions, and seeing a big check coming in, and the business increasing. But what’s the use of it?

You know, my business isn’t distributing roofing⁠—it’s principally keeping my competitors from distributing roofing.

Same with you. All we do is cut each other’s throats and make the public pay for it!”

out of putting it over on the labor unions, and seeing a big check coming in, and the business increasing. But what’s the use of it? You know, my business isn’t distributing roofing—it’s principally keeping my competitors from distributing roofing. Same with you.

All we do is cut each other’s throats and make the public pay for it!

”

“Good Lord, I don’t know what ‘rights’ a man has!

And I don’t know the solution of boredom. If I did, I’d be the one philosopher that had the cure for living.

But I do know that about ten times as many people find their lives dull, and unnecessarily dull, as ever admit it;

“Oh sure, Dad; of course.”

Ted had the immense and joyful maturity of a boy who is respectfully listened to by his elders.

Babbitt concentrated on him with grateful affection:

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

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

Just as he was an Elk, a Booster, and a member of the Chamber of Commerce, just as the priests of the Presbyterian Church determined his every religious belief and the senators who controlled the Republican Party decided in little smoky rooms in Washington what …

… belief and the senators who controlled the Republican Party decided in little smoky rooms in Washington what he should think about disarmament, tariff, and Germany, so did the large national advertisers fix the surface of his life, fix what he believed to be his individuality.

These standard advertised wares⁠—toothpastes, socks, tires, cameras, instantaneous hot-water heaters⁠—were his symbols and proofs of excellence; at first the signs, then the substitutes, for joy and passion and wisdom.

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

“

I hate your city. It has standardized all the beauty out of life.

It is one big railroad station—with all the people taking tickets for the best cemeteries,” Dr. Yavitch said placidly.

“No, what I fight in Zenith is standardization of thought, and, of course, the traditions of competition.

The real villains of the piece are the clean, kind, industrious Family Men who use every known brand of trickery and cruelty to insure the prosperity of their cubs.

The worst thing about these fellows is that they’re so good and, in their work at least, so intelligent. You can’t hate them properly, and yet their standardized minds are the enemy.

“Well, matter of taste.

Personally, I prefer a city with a future so unknown that it excites my imagination.

But what I particularly want—”

He was surprised and blasted then by a thought.

He wondered whether Floral Heights dinners were worth the hideous toil involved.

But he repented the sacrilege in the excitement of buying the materials for cocktails.

He was, in fact, so exhilarated that he was within a block of his house before he remembered that there was a certain matter, mentioned by his wife, of fetching ice cream from Vecchia’s. He explained, “Well, darn it—” and drove back.

Vecchia was not a caterer, he was The Caterer of Zenith.

Most coming-out parties were held in the white and gold ballroom of the Maison Vecchia; at all nice teas the guests recognized the five kinds of Vecchia sandwiches and the seven kinds of Vecchia cakes;

“Well,” in a loose, jocose manner, “I think the old man will!”

The cocktail filled him with a whirling exhilaration behind which he was aware of devastating desires⁠—to rush places in fast motors, to kiss girls, to sing, to be witty.

He sought to regain his lost dignity by announcing to Matilda:

He wondered whether he could persuade “as slow a bunch as Myra and the Littlefields to go some place aft’ dinner and raise Cain and maybe dig up smore booze.”

He perceived that he had gifts of profligacy which had been neglected.

By the time the guests had come, including the inevitable late couple for whom the others waited with painful amiability, a great gray emptiness had replaced the purple swirling in Babbitt’s head, and he had to force the tumultuous greetings suitable to a host on …

Eddie Swanson, a bald and bouncing young man who showed his taste for elegance by an evening waistcoat of figured black silk with glass buttons; Orville Jones, a steady-looking, stubby, not very memorable person, with a hemp-colored toothbrush mustache.

Yet they were all so well fed and clean, they all shouted “ ’Evenin’, Georgie!” with such robustness, that they seemed to be cousins, and the strange thing is that the longer one knew the women, the less alike they seemed; while the longer one knew the men, the more alike their bold patterns appeared.

The drinking of the cocktails was as canonical a rite as the mixing. The company waited, uneasily, hopefully, agreeing in a strained manner that the weather had been rather warm and slightly cold, but still Babbitt said nothing about drinks. They became despondent.

When, beyond hope, the pitcher was empty, they stood and talked about prohibition.

The men leaned back on their heels, put their hands in their trousers-pockets, and proclaimed their views with the booming profundity of a prosperous male repeating a thoroughly hackneyed statement about a matter of which he knows nothing whatever.

“Now, I’ll tell you,” said Virgil Gunch;

… the myth that the Great War had made work respectable, their husbands objected to their “wasting time and getting a lot of crank ideas” in unpaid social work, and still more to their causing a rumor, by earning money, that they were not adequately supported.

They worked perhaps two hours a day, and the rest of the time they ate chocolates, went to the motion-pictures, went window-shopping, went in gossiping twos and threes to card-parties, read magazines, thought timorously of the lovers who never appeared, and accumulated a splendid restlessness which they got rid of by nagging their husbands.

The husbands nagged back.

All of them hunched over, intent. They startled as someone drew a strained breath.

In the dusty light from the hall they looked unreal, they felt disembodied.

Mrs. Gunch squeaked, and they jumped with unnatural jocularity, but at Frink’s hiss they sank into subdued awe. Suddenly, incredibly, they heard a knocking. They stared at Frink’s half-revealed hands and found them lying still. They wriggled, and pretended not to be impressed.

She cried cheerily, “Now upstairs you go, and pop into bed. We’ll fix it all up. I’ll see to the doors. Now skip!”

For many minutes, for many hours, for a bleak eternity, he lay awake, shivering, reduced to primitive terror, comprehending that he had won freedom, and wondering what he could do with anything so unknown and so embarrassing as freedom.

By sliding the beds into low closets the bedrooms were converted into living-rooms. The kitchens were cupboards each containing an electric range, a copper sink, a glass refrigerator, and, very intermittently, a Balkan maid.

Everything about the Arms was excessively modern, and everything was compressed⁠—except the garages.

The Babbitts were calling on the Rieslings at the Arms. It was a speculative venture to call on the Rieslings; interesting and sometimes disconcerting. Zilla was an active, strident, full-blown, high-bosomed blonde. When she condescended to be good-humored she was nervously amusing.

Her comments on people were saltily satiric and penetrative of accepted hypocrisies. “That’s so!” you said, and looked sheepish. She danced wildly, and called on the world to be merry, but in the midst of it she would turn indignant. She was always becoming indignant.

Life was a plot against her and she exposed it furiously.

She was affable tonight. She merely hinted that Orville Jones wore a toupe, that Mrs. T. Cholmondeley Frink’s singing resembled a Ford going into high, and that the Hon.

“Let it go?” Zilla’s face was wrinkled like the Medusa, her voice was a dagger of corroded brass. She was full of the joy of righteousness and bad temper.

She was a crusader and, like every crusader, she exulted in the opportunity to be vicious in the name of virtue.

“Let it go? If people knew how many things I’ve let go—”

She abased herself completely. Also, she enjoyed it.

To the connoisseur of scenes, nothing is more enjoyable than a thorough, melodramatic, egoistic humility.

“I want you to let Paul beat it off to Maine with me,” Babbitt demanded.

Only Paul, sitting by himself, reading at a serial story in a newspaper, failed to join them and all but Babbitt regarded him as a snob, an eccentric, a person of no spirit.

Which of them said which has never been determined, and does not matter, since they all had the same ideas and expressed them always with the same ponderous and brassy assurance.

If it was not Babbitt who was delivering any given verdict, at least he was beaming on the chancellor who did deliver it.

Among them Babbitt hustled back to his office, to sit down with nothing much to do except see that the staff looked as though they were hustling.

Every Saturday afternoon he hustled out to his country club and hustled through nine holes of golf as a rest after the week’s hustle.

In Zenith it was as necessary for a Successful Man to belong to a country club as it was to wear a linen collar.

The meetings of the convention were held in the ballroom of the Allen House. In an anteroom was the office of the chairman of the executive committee.

He was the busiest man in the convention; he was so busy that he got nothing done whatever.

He sat at a marquetry table, in a room littered with crumpled paper and, all day long, town-boosters and lobbyists and orators who wished to lead debates came and whispered to him, whereupon he looked vague, and said rapidly, “Yes, yes, that’s a fine idea;

In the exhibit-room were plans of the new suburbs of Sparta, pictures of the new state capitol, at Galop de Vache, and large ears of corn with the label, “Nature’s Gold, from Shelby County, the Garden Spot of God’s Own Country.”

The real convention consisted of men muttering in hotel bedrooms or in groups amid the badge-spotted crowd in the hotel-lobby, but there was a show of public meetings.

The first of them opened with a welcome by the mayor of Monarch. The pastor of the First Christian Church of Monarch, a large man with a long damp frontal lock, informed God that the real-estate men were here now.

The first of them opened with a welcome by the mayor of Monarch.

The pastor of the First Christian Church of Monarch, a large man with a long damp frontal lock, informed God that the real-estate men were here now.

The venerable Minnemagantic realtor, Major Carlton Tuke, read a paper in which he denounced cooperative stores. William A. Larkin of Eureka gave a comforting prognosis of “The Prospects for Increased Construction,” and reminded them that plate-glass prices were two points lower.

Ed Overbrook was a classmate of Babbitt who had been a failure. He had a large family and a feeble insurance business out in the suburb of Dorchester. He was gray and thin and unimportant. He had always been gray and thin and unimportant.

He was the person whom, in any group, you forgot to introduce, then introduced with extra enthusiasm.

He had admired Babbitt’s good-fellowship in college, had admired ever since his power in real estate, his beautiful house and wonderful clothes. It pleased Babbitt, though it bothered him with a sense of responsibility.

He accepted Overbrook’s next plaintive invitation, for an evening two weeks off.

A dinner two weeks off, even a family dinner, never seems so appalling, till the two weeks have astoundingly disappeared and one comes dismayed to the ambushed hour.

They had to change the date, because of their own dinner to the McKelveys, but at last they gloomily drove out to the Overbrooks’ house in Dorchester.

Babbitt tried to be jovial; he worked at it; but he could find nothing to interest him in Overbrook’s timorousness, the blankness of the other guests, or the drained stupidity of Mrs. Overbrook, with her spectacles, drab skin, and tight-drawn hair.

He told his best Irish story, but it sank like soggy cake.

Most bleary moment of all was when Mrs. Overbrook, peering out of her fog of nursing eight children and cooking and scrubbing, tried to be conversational.

And it permitted the swaddled American husband to stay away from home for one evening a week.

The lodge was his piazza, his pavement café.

He could shoot pool and talk man-talk and be obscene and valiant.

… was too much the scholar and poet to imitate the evangelist, Mike Monday, yet he had once awakened his fold to new life, and to larger collections, by the challenge, “My brethren, the real cheap skate is the man who won’t lend to the Lord!”

He had made his church a true community center. It contained everything but a bar.

It had a nursery, a Thursday evening supper with a short bright missionary lecture afterward, a gymnasium, a fortnightly motion-picture show, a library of technical books for young workmen—though, unfortunately, no young workman ever entered the church except to wash the windows or repair the …

But the house has an effect not at all humorous. It embodies the heavy dignity of those Victorian financiers who ruled the generation between the pioneers and the brisk “sales-engineers” and created a somber oligarchy by gaining control of banks, mills, land, railroads, mines.

Out of the dozen contradictory Zeniths which together make up the true and complete Zenith, none is so powerful and enduring yet none so unfamiliar to the citizens as the small, still, dry, polite, cruel Zenith of the William Eathornes; and for that tiny hierarchy the other Zeniths unwittingly labor and insignificantly die.

Most of the castles of the testy Victorian tetrarchs are gone now or decayed into boardinghouses, but the Eathorne Mansion remains virtuous and aloof, reminiscent of London, Back Bay, Rittenhouse Square.

Babbitt did not drive home, but toward the center of the city. He wished to be by himself and exult over the beauty of intimacy with William Washington Eathorne.

A snow-blanched evening of ringing pavements and eager lights.

Great golden lights of trolley-cars sliding along the packed snow of the roadway. Demure lights of little houses. The belching glare of a distant foundry, wiping out the sharp-edged stars. Lights of neighborhood drug stores where friends gossiped, well pleased, after the day’s work.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 boardinghouse filled with widows, red-plush furniture, and the sound of ice-water pitchers.

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 homebody without all these Ideas that so many girls seem to have nowadays;”

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.

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 someone 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.

“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.”

“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.

”

I’d rather listen to a good jazz band any time than to some piece by Beethoven that hasn’t any more tune to it than a bunch of fighting cats, and you couldn’t whistle it to save your life! But that isn’t the point.

Culture has become as necessary an adornment and advertisement for a city today as pavements or bank-clearances.

It’s Culture, in theaters and art-galleries and so on, that brings thousands of visitors to New York every year and, to be frank, for all our splendid attainments we haven’t yet got the Culture of a New York or Chicago or Boston—or at least we …

If she were here Myra would be hinting, “Isn’t it late, Georgie?” He tramped in forlorn and unwanted freedom. Fog hid the house now.

The world was uncreated, a chaos without turmoil or desire.

Through the mist came a man at so feverish a pace that he seemed to dance with fury as he entered the orb of glow from a streetlamp. At each step he brandished his stick and brought it down with a crash.

He darted on with an alarming plunge, seeming always to pitch forward yet never quite falling.

Babbitt would have been no more astonished and no less had a ghost skipped out of the fog carrying his head.

He accepted Frink with vast apathy; he grunted, “Poor boob!” and straightway forgot him.

What was he getting out of rebellion? Misery and shame—the shame of being treated as an offensive small boy by a ragamuffin like Ida Putiak! And yet—Always he came back to “And yet.”

Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.

Only, he assured himself, he was “through with this chasing after girls.”

By noontime he was not so sure even of that. If in Miss McGoun, Louetta Swanson, and Ida he had failed to find the lady kind and lovely, it did not prove that she did not exist.

He was hunted by the ancient thought that somewhere must exist the not impossible she who would understand him, value him, and make him happy.

Mrs. Babbitt returned in August.

The lights of the hotel and the cottages became yellow dots, a cluster of glowworms at the base of Sachem Mountain.

Larger and ever more imperturbable was the mountain in the star-filtered darkness, and the lake a limitless pavement of black marble.

He was dwarfed and dumb and a little awed, but that insignificance freed him from the pomposities of being Mr. George F. Babbitt of Zenith; saddened and freed his heart.

Babbitt was up, hat in hand, growling, “Well, if that’s what you call being at peace, for heaven’s sake just warn me before you go to war, will you?”

Vast is the power of cities to reclaim the wanderer.

More than mountains or the shore-devouring sea, a city retains its character, imperturbable, cynical, holding behind apparent changes its essential purpose.

Vast is the power of cities to reclaim the wanderer.

More than mountains or the shore-devouring sea, a city retains its character, imperturbable, cynical, holding behind apparent changes its essential purpose.

Though Babbitt had deserted his family and dwelt with Joe Paradise in the wilderness, though he had become a liberal, though he had been quite sure, on the night before he reached Zenith, that neither he nor the city would be the same again, ten …

There was no one in Zenith who talked of anything but the strike, and no one who did not take sides.

You were either a courageous friend of Labor, or you were a fearless supporter of the Rights of Property; and in either case you were belligerent, and ready to disown any friend who did not hate the enemy.

A condensed-milk plant was set afire—each side charged it to the other—and the city was hysterical.

Beyond them was a hill with a gouge of yellow clay like a vast wound. Behind every apartment-house, beside each dwelling, were small garages. It was a world of good little people, comfortable, industrious, credulous.

In the autumnal light the flat newness was mellowed, and the air was a sun-tinted pool.

“Golly, it’s one fine afternoon. You get a great view here, right up Tanner’s Hill,” said Babbitt.

They agreed that the weather would soon turn cold.

They agreed that prohibition was prohibitive.

They agreed that art in the home was cultural. They agreed about everything. They even became bold. They hinted that these modern young girls, well, honestly, their short skirts were short. They were proud to find that they were not shocked by such frank speaking.

He had a new view of his sporting neighbor, Sam Doppelbrau. The Doppelbraus were respectable people, industrious people, prosperous people, whose ideal of happiness was an eternal cabaret.

Their life was dominated by suburban bacchanalia of alcohol, nicotine, gasoline, and kisses.

They and their set worked capably all the week, and all week looked forward to Saturday night, when they would, as they expressed it, “throw a party;”

He was certain that she knew he was associating with what Floral Heights called “a sporty crowd,” yet neither of them acknowledged it.

In matrimonial geography the distance between the first mute recognition of a break and the admission thereof is as great as the distance between the first naive faith and the first doubting.

As he began to drift away he also began to see her as a human being, to like and dislike her instead of accepting her as a comparatively movable part of the furniture, and he compassionated that husband-and-wife relation which, in twenty-five years of married …

Here were gathered sixty-five women and ten men. Most of the men slouched in their chairs and wriggled, while their wives sat rigidly at attention, but two of them—red-necked, meaty men—were as respectably devout as their wives.

They were newly rich contractors who, having bought houses, motors, hand-painted pictures, and gentlemanliness, were now buying a refined ready-made philosophy.

It had been a toss-up with them whether to buy New Thought, Christian Science, or a good standard high-church model of Episcopalianism.

He said some thoroughly sound things about Disarmament, and broad-mindedness and liberalism; but it seemed to him that General Topics interested Tanis only when she could apply them to Pete, Carrie, or themselves. He was distressingly conscious of their silence.

He tried to stir her into chattering again, but silence rose like a gray presence and hovered between them.

“I, uh—” he labored. “It strikes me—it strikes me that unemployment is lessening.”

She was so reasonable, she was so gently right!

It took him an hour to make his escape, with nothing settled and everything horribly settled.

In a barren freedom of icy Northern wind he sighed, “Thank God that’s over! Poor Tanis, poor darling decent Tanis! But it is over. Absolute! I’m free!”

Well, you can’t expect the decent citizens to go on aiding you if you intend to side with precisely the people who are trying to undermine us.”

Babbitt was frightened, but he had an agonized instinct that if he yielded in this he would yield in everything.

He protested:

He could not stand the strain.

Before long he admitted that he would like to flee back to the security of conformity, provided there was a decent and creditable way to return.

But, stubbornly, he would not be forced back; he would not, he swore, “eat dirt.”