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if
everybody looked after their car the way you do."
      "Well, I do try and have some sense about it."
Babbitt paid his bill, said adequately, "Oh, keep the change," and
drove off in an ecstasy of honest self-appreciation. It was with
the manner of a Good Samaritan that he shouted at a
respectable-looking man who was waiting for a trolley car, "Have a
lift?" As the man climbed in Babbitt condescended, "Going clear
down-town? Whenever I see a fellow waiting for a trolley, I always
make it a practice to give him a lift - unless, of course, he looks
like a bum."
      "Wish there were more folks that were so generous
with their machines," dutifully said the victim of benevolence.
"Oh, no, 'tain't a question of generosity, hardly. Fact, I always
feel - I was saying to my son just the other night - it's a
fellow's duty to share the good things of this world with his
neighbors, and it gets my goat when a fellow gets stuck on himself
and goes around tooting his horn merely because he's
charitable."
      The victim seemed unable to find the right answer.
Babbitt boomed on:
      "Pretty punk service the Company giving us on these
car-lines. Nonsense to only run the Portland Road cars once every
seven minutes. Fellow gets mighty cold on a winter morning, waiting
on a street corner with the wind nipping at his ankles."
      "That's right. The Street Car Company don't care a
damn what kind of a deal they give us. Something ought to happen to
'em."
      Babbitt was alarmed. "But still, of course it won't
do to just keep knocking the Traction Company and not realize the
difficulties they're operating under, like these cranks that want
municipal ownership. The way these workmen hold up the Company for
high wages is simply a crime, and of course the burden falls on you
and me that have to pay a seven-cent fare! Fact, there's remarkable
service on all their lines - considering."
      "Well - " uneasily.
      "Darn fine morning," Babbitt explained. "Spring
coming along fast."
      "Yes, it's real spring now."
      The victim had no originality, no wit, and Babbitt
fell into a great silence and devoted himself to the game of
beating trolley cars to the corner: a spurt, a tail-chase, nervous
speeding between the huge yellow side of the trolley and the jagged
row of parked motors, shooting past just as the trolley stopped - a
rare game and valiant.
      And all the while he was conscious of the loveliness
of Zenith. For weeks together he noticed nothing but clients and
the vexing To Rent signs of rival brokers. To-day, in mysterious
malaise, he raged or rejoiced with equal nervous swiftness, and
to-day the light of spring was so winsome that he lifted his head
and saw.
      He admired each district along his familiar route to
the office: The bungalows and shrubs and winding irregular drive
ways of Floral Heights. The one-story shops on Smith Street, a
glare of plate-glass and new yellow brick; groceries and laundries
and drug-stores to supply the more immediate needs of East Side
housewives. The market gardens in Dutch Hollow, their shanties
patched with corrugated iron and stolen doors. Billboards with
crimson goddesses nine feet tall advertising cinema films, pipe
tobacco, and talcum powder. The old "mansions" along Ninth Street,
S. E., like aged dandies in filthy linen; wooden castles turned
into boarding-houses, with muddy walks and rusty hedges, jostled by
fast-intruding garages, cheap apartment-houses, and fruit-stands
conducted by bland, sleek Athenians. 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