Babbitt

mit an advertisement. Babbitt disapproved of Laylock, who sang in choirs and was merry at home over games of Hearts and Old Maid. He had a tenor voice, wavy chestnut hair, and a mustache like a cam

peach of an ad for t

thing in poetry? Hone

-power.

sures and

r you m

ovide the l

provide

-like 'Home Sweet

w,' or 'Eventually, why not now?' Course I believe in using poetry and humor and all that junk when it turns the trick, but with a high-class re

timulate the talent of the older craftsman, George F. Babbitt. He grumbled to Stanley Graff, "Th

PECT YOUR

ow for certain that you have done your best for the Depart

DEN

ith, where exquisitely gardened plots look from daisy-do

e a

OMPSON REA

s Bui

Mott and his weedy old Wildwood Cemete

I

pool-room; he ran over the list of home-leases which were about to expire; he sent Thomas Bywaters, a street-car conductor who played at real estate in spare time, to call on side-street "prospects" who were u

ls of tobacco, courageously made resolves, laid out plans to check the vice, tapered off his allowance of cigars,

of each smoke, and ecstatically increasing the intervals between smokes, he h

the outer office. "I'll just naturally be ashamed to go poking in there all day long, making a fool of myself before my own employees!" he reason

ly recovered the key, walked with forbidding dignity to the file, took out a cigar and a match-"but only one match; if ole cigar goes out, it'll by golly have to stay out!" Later, when the cigar did go out, he took one more match from the file, and when a buyer and a seller came in for a conference at eleven-thirty, naturally he had to

his love of music, as a younger brother, to be petted and protected. Paul had gone into his father's business, after graduation; he was now a wholesaler and small manufacturer of prepared-paper roofing. But Babbitt strenuously believed and lengthily announced to the world of Good Fellows that Paul c

elephone the

s is the trouble? Can't you get me South 343? Why certainly they'll answer. Oh

uh

rge spe

uh

old s

iddlin'. H

us. Well, wha

othing

been keepin

in' round. What

lil lunch

t with me, I

ou there twe

lve-thirty. S'

re a thousand nervous details: calls from clerks who were incessantly and hopefully seeking five furnished roo

kind was perhaps lessened by his large and complacent ignorance of all architecture save the types of houses turned out by speculative builders; all landscape gardening save the use of curving roads, grass, and six ordinary shrubs; and all the commonest axioms of economics. He serenely believed that the one purpose of the real-estate business was to make money for George F. Babbitt. True, it was a good advertisement at Boosters' Club lunches, and all the varieties of Annual Banquets to which Good Fellows were invited, to speak s

future development of the community, and as a prophetic engineer clearing the pathway for inevitable changes"-which me

ts environs. Where a surgeon is a specialist on every vein and mysterious cell of the human body, and the engineer upon electricity in all its phases, or

not know how many firemen there were in the city, how they were trained and paid, or how complete their apparatus. He sang eloquently the advantages of proximity of school-buildings to rentable homes, but he did not know-he did not know that it was worth while to know-whether the city schoolrooms were properly heated, li

um tremens, and insanity was not the perfect way of educating them. He had controverted the report by growling, "Folks that think a jail ought to be a bloomin' Hotel Thornleigh make me sick. If people don't like a jail, let 'em behave 'emselves and keep out of it. Besides, these reform cranks always exaggerate." That was the beginning and quite completely the end

abbitt had thought a great deal, and hi

rce men to join a union should be hanged. In fact, just between ourselves, there oughtn't to be any unions allowed at all; and as it's the best way of fighting the unions, every business ma

ut tests of drinking water; and in the matters of plumbing and sewage he was as unlearned as he was voluble. He often referred to the excellence of the bathrooms in the houses he sold. He was fond of explaining why it was that no European ever bathed. So

e sewage-system. It made him feel superior; it enabled him to sneer privily at the Martin Lumsen development, Avonlea, which had a cesspool; and it provided a chorus for the full-page advertisements in which he announced the beauty, conveni

supposed that the Babbitt-Thompson Company were merely agents for Glen Oriole, serving the real owner, Jake Offutt, but the fact was that Babbitt and Thompson owned sixty-two per cent. of the Glen, the president and purchasing agent of the Zenith Street Traction Company owned twenty-eight per cent., and Jake Offutt (a ga

aws against motor-speeding; he paid his debts; he contributed to the church, the Red Cross, and the Y. M. C. A.; he followed the custom o

roving my principal a liar! And then most folks are so darn crooked themselves that they expect a fellow to do a little lying, so if I was fool enough to never whoop the ante I'd get the credit for lying anyway! In self-defense I got to toot my own horn, like a lawyer defending a client-his bounden duty, ain't it, to bring ou

n than this morning, in the conference at eleven-thir

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 per cent. profit which, according to all authorities, a pioneer deserves for his risks and fo

consulted Babbitt, and trus

his present shop but did not own the one available lot adjoining. He advised Conrad Lyte to purchase this lot, for eleven thousand dollars, though an appraisal on a basis of rents did not indicate its value as above nine thousand. The rents, declared Babbitt, were too

paid by the community to Mr. Conrad Lyte for the virtue of employing a broker who had Vision and who under

im at the street door of the office and guided him toward the private room with affectionate little cries of "This way, Brother Purdy!" He took from the correspondence-file the entire box of cigars and forced them on h

ty first. I said to Lyte, 'It'd be a rotten shame,' I said, 'if somebody went and opened a combination grocery and meat market right next door and ruined Purdy's nice little business.' Especially-" Babbitt leaned

trousers, thrust his hands back into his pockets, tilted in

you don't realize the Pulling Power that

st as you feel, old man. We thought we'd

, 'twa'n't two years ago, and here you fellows are asking me twenty-four thousand dollars! Why, I'd have to mortgage-I wouldn't mind so much

s beside the point. Tell you what we'll do: We'll come down to twenty-three thousand-five thousand down and the rest on mortgage-and if you want to wreck the old shack and rebuild, I guess I can get Lyte here to loosen up for a building-mortgage on good liberal t

e right moment Babbitt snatched from a drawer the agreement he had had Miss McGoun type out a week ago and thrust it into Purdy's

-fifty dollar commission, Purdy had, by the sensitive mechanism of modern finance, been provided with a business-building, an

was the only really amusing contest he had been planning. There

ork, the old skinflint! And-What else have I got to do to-day?... Like to take a good long vacati