orchestra of fifty pieces which played
Arrangements from the Operas and suites portraying a Day on the Farm,
or a Four-alarm Fire. In the stone rotunda, decorated with
crown-embroidered velvet chairs and almost medieval tapestries,
parrakeets sat on gilded lotos columns.

With exclamations of "Well, by golly!" and "You got to go some to
beat this dump!" Babbitt admired the Chateau. As he stared across the
thousands of heads, a gray plain in the dimness, as he smelled good
clothes and mild perfume and chewing-gum, he felt as when he had first
seen a mountain and realized how very, very much earth and rock there
was in it.

He liked three kinds of films: pretty bathing girls with bare legs;
policemen or cowboys and an industrious shooting of revolvers; and
funny fat men who ate spaghetti. He chuckled with immense, moist-eyed
sentimentality at interludes portraying puppies, kittens, and chubby
babies; and he wept at deathbeds and old mothers being patient in
mortgaged cottages. Mrs. Babbitt preferred the pictures in which
handsome young women in elaborate frocks moved through sets ticketed as
the drawing-rooms of New York millionaires. As for Tinka, she preferred,
or was believed to prefer, whatever her parents told her to.

All his relaxations--baseball, golf, movies, bridge, motoring, long
talks with Paul at the Athletic Club, or at the Good Red Beef and Old
English Chop House--were necessary to Babbitt, for he was entering a
year of such activity as he had never known.

CHAPTER XIII

I

IT was by accident that Babbitt had his opportunity to address the S. A.
R. E. B.

The S. A. R. E. B., as its members called it, with the universal
passion for mysterious and important-sounding initials, was the State
Association of Real Estate Boards; the organization of brokers and
operators. It was to hold its annual convention at Monarch, Zenith's
chief rival among the cities of the state. Babbitt was an official
delegate; another was Cecil Rountree, whom Babbitt admired for his
picaresque speculative building, and hated for his social position,
for being present at the smartest dances on Royal Ridge. Rountree was
chairman of the convention program-committee.

Babbitt had growled to him, "Makes me tired the way these doctors and
profs and preachers put on lugs about being 'professional men.' A good
realtor has to have more knowledge and finesse than any of 'em."

"Right you are! I say: Why don't you put that into a