ar, yet the Babbitt who
was free of the magnificence of the Athletic Club entered with
embarrassment. He nodded to the doorman, an ancient proud negro with
brass buttons and a blue tail-coat, and paraded through the hall, trying
to look like a member.

Sixty men had come to the dinner. They made islands and eddies in
the hall; they packed the elevator and the corners of the private
dining-room. They tried to be intimate and enthusiastic. They appeared
to one another exactly as they had in college--as raw youngsters whose
present mustaches, baldnesses, paunches, and wrinkles were but jovial
disguises put on for the evening. "You haven't changed a particle!"
they marveled. The men whom they could not recall they addressed, "Well,
well, great to see you again, old man. What are you--Still doing the
same thing?"

Some one was always starting a cheer or a college song, and it was
always thinning into silence. Despite their resolution to be democratic
they divided into two sets: the men with dress-clothes and the men
without. Babbitt (extremely in dress-clothes) went from one group to the
other. Though he was, almost frankly, out for social conquest, he sought
Paul Riesling first. He found him alone, neat and silent.

Paul sighed, "I'm no good at this handshaking and 'well, look who's
here' bunk."

"Rats now, Paulibus, loosen up and be a mixer! Finest bunch of boys on
earth! Say, you seem kind of glum. What's matter?"

"Oh, the usual. Run-in with Zilla."

"Come on! Let's wade in and forget our troubles."

He kept Paul beside him, but worked toward the spot where Charles
McKelvey stood warming his admirers like a furnace.

McKelvey had been the hero of the Class of '96; not only football
captain and hammer-thrower but debater, and passable in what the State
University considered scholarship. He had gone on, had captured the
construction-company once owned by the Dodsworths, best-known pioneer
family of Zenith. He built state capitols, skyscrapers, railway
terminals. He was a heavy-shouldered, big-chested man, but not sluggish.
There was a quiet humor in his eyes, a syrup-smooth quickness in his
speech, which intimidated politicians and warned reporters; and in his
presence the most intelligent scientist or the most sensitive artist
felt thin-blooded, unworldly, and a little shabby. He was, particularly
when he was influencing legislatures or hiring labor-spies, very easy
and lovable and gorgeous. He was baronial; he