t I like to have a
chance to visit with you and the children instead of all this idiotic
chasing round."

They did not speak of the McKelveys again.

V

It was a shame, at this worried time, to have to think about the
Overbrooks.

Ed Overbrook was a classmate of Babbitt who had been a failure. He had
a large family and a feeble insurance business out in the suburb of
Dorchester. He was gray and thin and unimportant. He had always been
gray and thin and unimportant. He was the person whom, in any group,
you forgot to introduce, then introduced with extra enthusiasm. He had
admired Babbitt's good-fellowship in college, had admired ever since
his power in real estate, his beautiful house and wonderful clothes. It
pleased Babbitt, though it bothered him with a sense of responsibility.
At the class-dinner he had seen poor Overbrook, in a shiny blue serge
business-suit, being diffident in a corner with three other failures.
He had gone over and been cordial: "Why, hello, young Ed! I hear you're
writing all the insurance in Dorchester now. Bully work!"

They recalled the good old days when Overbrook used to write poetry.
Overbrook embarrassed him by blurting, "Say, Georgie, I hate to think
of how we been drifting apart. I wish you and Mrs. Babbitt would come to
dinner some night."

Babbitt boomed, "Fine! Sure! Just let me know. And the wife and I want
to have you at the house." He forgot it, but unfortunately Ed Overbrook
did not. Repeatedly he telephoned to Babbitt, inviting him to dinner.
"Might as well go and get it over," Babbitt groaned to his wife. "But
don't it simply amaze you the way the poor fish doesn't know the first
thing about social etiquette? Think of him 'phoning me, instead of his
wife sitting down and writing us a regular bid! Well, I guess
we're stuck for it. That's the trouble with all this class-brother
hooptedoodle."

He accepted Overbrook's next plaintive invitation, for an evening two
weeks off. A dinner two weeks off, even a family dinner, never seems
so appalling, till the two weeks have astoundingly disappeared and
one comes dismayed to the ambushed hour. They had to change the date,
because of their own dinner to the McKelveys, but at last they gloomily
drove out to the Overbrooks' house in Dorchester.

It was miserable from the beginning. The Overbrooks had dinner at
six-thirty, while the Babbitts never dined before seven. Babbitt
permitted himself to be ten minutes late. "Let's make