was always vaguely
protecting who kept him from his drunken desires.

But even Paul lightened when Willis Ijams, a salesman with poetry and
diplomacy, discussed flies. "Now, of course, you boys know." he said,
"the great scrap is between dry flies and wet flies. Personally, I'm for
dry flies. More sporting."

"That's so. Lots more sporting," fulminated Babbitt, who knew very
little about flies either wet or dry.

"Now if you'll take my advice, Georgie, you'll stock up well on these
pale evening dims, and silver sedges, and red ants. Oh, boy, there's a
fly, that red ant!"

"You bet! That's what it is--a fly!" rejoiced Babbitt.

"Yes, sir, that red ant," said Ijams, "is a real honest-to-God FLY!"

"Oh, I guess ole Mr. Trout won't come a-hustling when I drop one of
those red ants on the water!" asserted Babbitt, and his thick wrists
made a rapturous motion of casting.

"Yes, and the landlocked salmon will take it, too," said Ijams, who had
never seen a landlocked salmon.

"Salmon! Trout! Say, Paul, can you see Uncle George with his khaki pants
on haulin' 'em in, some morning 'bout seven? Whee!"

III

They were on the New York express, incredibly bound for Maine,
incredibly without their families. They were free, in a man's world, in
the smoking-compartment of the Pullman.

Outside the car window was a glaze of darkness stippled with the gold
of infrequent mysterious lights. Babbitt was immensely conscious, in
the sway and authoritative clatter of the train, of going, of going on.
Leaning toward Paul he grunted, "Gosh, pretty nice to be hiking, eh?"

The small room, with its walls of ocher-colored steel, was filled mostly
with the sort of men he classified as the Best Fellows You'll Ever
Meet--Real Good Mixers. There were four of them on the long seat; a fat
man with a shrewd fat face, a knife-edged man in a green velour hat,
a very young young man with an imitation amber cigarette-holder, and
Babbitt. Facing them, on two movable leather chairs, were Paul and a
lanky, old-fashioned man, very cunning, with wrinkles bracketing
his mouth. They all read newspapers or trade journals, boot-and-shoe
journals, crockery journals, and waited for the joys of conversation.
It was the very young man, now making his first journey by Pullman, who
began it.

"Say, gee, I had a wild old time in Zenith!" he gloried. "Say, if a
fellow knows the ropes there he can have as wild a time as he can in New
York!"

"Yuh, I bet yo