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lover
of Zenith. He thought of the outlying factory suburbs; of the
Chaloosa River with its strangely eroded banks; of the
orchard-dappled Tonawanda Hills to the North, and all the fat dairy
land and big barns and comfortable herds. As he dropped his
passenger he cried, "Gosh, I feel pretty good this morning!"
III
      Epochal as starting the car was the drama of parking
it before he entered his office. As he turned from Oberlin Avenue
round the corner into Third Street, N.E., he peered ahead for a
space in the line of parked cars. He angrily just missed a space as
a rival driver slid into it. Ahead, another car was leaving the
curb, and Babbitt slowed up, holding out his hand to the cars
pressing on him from behind, agitatedly motioning an old woman to
go ahead, avoiding a truck which bore down on him from one side.
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.
      The Reeves Building was as fireproof as a rock and
as efficient as a typewriter; fourteen stories of yellow pressed
brick, with clean, upright, unornamented lines. It was filled with
the offices of lawyers, doctors, agents for machinery, for emery
wheels, for wire fencing, for mining-stock. Their gold signs shone
on the windows. The entrance was too modern to be flamboyant with
pillars; it was quiet, shrewd, neat. Along the Third Street side
were a Western Union Telegraph Office, the Blue Delft Candy Shop,
Shotwell's Stationery Shop, and the Babbitt-Thompson Realty
Company.
      Babbitt could have entered his office from the
street, as customers did, but it made him feel an insider to go
through the corridor of the building and enter by the back door.
Thus he was greeted by the villagers.
      The little unknown people who inhabited the Reeves
Building corridors - elevator-runners, starter, engineers,
superintendent, and the doubtful-looking lame man who conducted the
news and cigar stand - were in no way city-dwellers. They were
rustics, living in a constricted valley, interested only in one
another and in The Building. Their Main Street was the entrance
hall, with its stone floor, severe marble ceiling, and the inner
windows of the shops. The liveliest place on the street was the
Reeves Building Barber Shop, but this was also Babbitt's one
embarrassment. Himself, he patronized the glittering Pompeian
Barber Shop in the Hotel Thornleigh, and every time he passed the
Reeves shop - ten times a day, a hundred times - he felt untrue to
his own village.
      Now, as one of the squirearchy, greeted with
honorable salutations by the villagers, he marched into his office,
and peace and dignity were upon him, and the morning's dissonances
all unheard.
      They were heard again, immediately.
      Stanley Graff, the outside salesman, was talking on
the telephone with tragic lack of that firm manner which
disciplines clients: "Say, uh, I think I got just the house that
would suit you - the Percival House, in Linton.... Oh, you've seen
it. Well, how'd it strike you? . . . Huh? . . . Oh," irresolutely,
"oh, I see."
      As Babbitt marched into his private room, a coop
with semi-partition of oak and frosted glass, at the back of the
office, he reflected how hard it was to find employees who had his
own faith that he was going to make sales.
      There were nine members of the staff, besides
Babbitt and his partner and father-in-law, Henry Thompson, who
rarely came to the office. The nine were Stanley Graff, the outside
salesman - a youngish man given to cigarettes and the playing of
pool; old Mat Penniman, general utility man, collector of rents and
salesman of insurance -