Free Babbit by Sinclair Lewis Page A

at Parcher's
to buy him some collars, and before she could give his neck-size
the clerk slips her some thirteens. 'How juh know the size?' says
Mrs. Babbitt, and the clerk says, 'Men that let their wives buy
collars for 'em always wear thirteen, madam.' How's that! That's
pretty good, eh? How's that, eh? I guess that'll about fix you,
George!"
      "I - I - " Babbitt sought for amiable insults in
answer. He stopped, stared at the door. Paul Riesling was coming
in. Babbitt cried, "See you later, boys," and hastened across the
lobby. He was, just then, neither the sulky child of the
sleeping-porch, the domestic tyrant of the breakfast table, the
crafty money-changer of the Lyte-Purdy conference, nor the blaring
Good Fellow, the Josher and Regular Guy, of the Athletic Club. He
was an older brother to Paul Riesling, swift to defend him,
admiring him with a proud and credulous love passing the love of
women. Paul and he shook hands solemnly; they smiled as shyly as
though they had been parted three years, not three days - and they
said:
      "How's the old horse-thief?"
      "All right, I guess. How're you, you poor
shrimp?"
      "I'm first-rate, you second-hand hunk o'
cheese."
      Reassured thus of their high fondness, Babbitt
grunted, "You're a fine guy, you are! Ten minutes late!" Riesling
snapped, "Well, you're lucky to have a chance to lunch with a
gentleman!" They grinned and went into the Neronian washroom, where
a line of men bent over the bowls inset along a prodigious slab of
marble as in religious prostration before their own images in the
massy mirror. Voices thick, satisfied, authoritative, hurtled along
the marble walls, bounded from the ceiling of lavender-bordered
milky tiles, while the lords of the city, the barons of insurance
and law and fertilizers and motor tires, laid down the law for
Zenith; announced that the day was warm-indeed, indisputably of
spring; that wages were too high and the interest on mortgages too
low; that Babe Ruth, the eminent player of baseball, was a noble
man; and that "those two nuts at the Climax Vaudeville Theater this
week certainly are a slick pair of actors." Babbitt, though
ordinarily his voice was the surest and most episcopal of all, was
silent. In the presence of the slight dark reticence of Paul
Riesling, he was awkward, he desired to be quiet and firm and
deft.
      The entrance lobby of the Athletic Club was Gothic,
the washroom Roman Imperial, the lounge Spanish Mission, and the
reading-room in Chinese Chippendale, but the gem of the club was
the dining-room, the masterpiece of Ferdinand Reitman, Zenith's
busiest architect. It was lofty and half-timbered, with Tudor
leaded casements, an oriel, a somewhat musicianless
musicians'-gallery, and tapestries believed to illustrate the
granting of Magna Charta. The open beams had been hand-adzed at
Jake Offutt's car-body works, the hinge; were of hand-wrought iron,
the wainscot studded with handmade wooden pegs, and at one end of
the room was a heraldic and hooded stone fireplace which the club's
advertising-pamphlet asserted to be not only larger than any of the
fireplaces in European castles but of a draught incomparably more
scientific. It was also much cleaner, as no fire had ever been
built in it.
      Half of the tables were mammoth slabs which seated
twenty or thirty men. Babbitt usually sat at the one near the door,
with a group including Gunch, Finkelstein, Professor Pumphrey,
Howard Littlefield, his neighbor, T. Cholmondeley Frink, the poet
and advertising-agent, and Orville Jones, whose laundry was in many
ways the best in Zenith. They composed a club within the club, and
merrily called themselves "The Roughnecks." To-day as he passed
their table the Roughnecks greeted him, "Come on, sit in! You 'n'
Paul too proud to feed with poor folks? Afraid somebody might stick
you for a bottle of Bevo, George? Strikes me you swells are getting
awful darn exclusive!"
      He thundered, "You bet! We can't afford to have our
reps