ap from the trolleys, to gallop across
the sidewalk, to hurl themselves into buildings, into hustling express
elevators. Men in dairy lunches were hustling to gulp down the food
which cooks had hustled to fry. Men in barber shops were snapping, "Jus'
shave me once over. Gotta hustle." Men were feverishly getting rid of
visitors in offices adorned with the signs, "This Is My Busy Day" and
"The Lord Created the World in Six Days--You Can Spiel All You Got to
Say in Six Minutes." Men who had made five thousand, year before last,
and ten thousand last year, were urging on nerve-yelping bodies and
parched brains so that they might make twenty thousand this year;
and the men who had broken down immediately after making their twenty
thousand dollars were hustling to catch trains, to hustle through the
vacations which the hustling doctors had ordered.

Among them Babbitt hustled back to his office, to sit down with
nothing much to do except see that the staff looked as though they were
hustling.

III

Every Saturday afternoon he hustled out to his country club and hustled
through nine holes of golf as a rest after the week's hustle.

In Zenith it was as necessary for a Successful Man to belong to a
country club as it was to wear a linen collar. Babbitt's was the Outing
Golf and Country Club, a pleasant gray-shingled building with a broad
porch, on a daisy-starred cliff above Lake Kennepoose. There was
another, the Tonawanda Country Club, to which belonged Charles McKelvey,
Horace Updike, and the other rich men who lunched not at the Athletic
but at the Union Club. Babbitt explained with frequency, "You couldn't
hire me to join the Tonawanda, even if I did have a hundred and eighty
bucks to throw away on the initiation fee. At the Outing we've got
a bunch of real human fellows, and the finest lot of little women in
town--just as good at joshing as the men--but at the Tonawanda there's
nothing but these would-be's in New York get-ups, drinking tea! Too
much dog altogether. Why, I wouldn't join the Tonawanda even if they--I
wouldn't join it on a bet!"

When he had played four or five holes, he relaxed a bit, his
tobacco-fluttering heart beat more normally, and his voice slowed to the
drawling of his hundred generations of peasant ancestors.

IV

At least once a week Mr. and Mrs. Babbitt and Tinka went to the movies.
Their favorite motion-picture theater was the Chateau, which held three
thousand spectators and had an