sco!
We'll--tell--the--world!"

The guests drove off; the garden shivered into quiet. But Mrs. Crosby
Knowlton sighed as she looked at a marble seat warm from five hundred
summers of Amalfi. On the face of a winged sphinx which supported it
some one had drawn a mustache in lead-pencil. Crumpled paper napkins
were dumped among the Michaelmas daisies. On the walk, like shredded
lovely flesh, were the petals of the last gallant rose. Cigarette stubs
floated in the goldfish pool, trailing an evil stain as they swelled and
disintegrated, and beneath the marble seat, the fragments carefully put
together, was a smashed teacup.

VI

As he rode back to the hotel Babbitt reflected, "Myra would have enjoyed
all this social agony." For himself he cared less for the garden party
than for the motor tours which the Monarch Chamber of Commerce
had arranged. Indefatigably he viewed water-reservoirs, suburban
trolley-stations, and tanneries. He devoured the statistics which were
given to him, and marveled to his roommate, W. A. Rogers, "Of course
this town isn't a patch on Zenith; it hasn't got our outlook and
natural resources; but did you know--I nev' did till to-day--that they
manufactured seven hundred and sixty-three million feet of lumber last
year? What d' you think of that!"

He was nervous as the time for reading his paper approached. When he
stood on the low platform before the convention, he trembled and saw
only a purple haze. But he was in earnest, and when he had finished the
formal paper he talked to them, his hands in his pockets, his spectacled
face a flashing disk, like a plate set up on edge in the lamplight.
They shouted "That's the stuff!" and in the discussion afterward they
referred with impressiveness to "our friend and brother, Mr. George F.
Babbitt." He had in fifteen minutes changed from a minor delegate to
a personage almost as well known as that diplomat of business, Cecil
Rountree. After the meeting, delegates from all over the state said,
"Hower you, Brother Babbitt?" Sixteen complete strangers called him
"George," and three men took him into corners to confide, "Mighty glad
you had the courage to stand up and give the Profession a real boost.
Now I've always maintained--"

Next morning, with tremendous casualness, Babbitt asked the girl at the
hotel news-stand for the newspapers from Zenith. There was nothing in
the Press, but in the Advocate-Times, on the third page--He gasped.
They had printed h