bad. Had too much of this hooptedoodle and good-fellow
stuff. I--Why couldn't I organize a bank of my own some day? And Ted
succeed me!"

He drove happily home, and to Mrs. Babbitt he was a William Washington
Eathorne, but she did not notice it.

III

Young Kenneth Escott, reporter on the Advocate-Times was appointed
press-agent of the Chatham Road Presbyterian Sunday School. He gave six
hours a week to it. At least he was paid for giving six hours a week.
He had friends on the Press and the Gazette and he was not (officially)
known as a press-agent. He procured a trickle of insinuating items
about neighborliness and the Bible, about class-suppers, jolly but
educational, and the value of the Prayer-life in attaining financial
success.

The Sunday School adopted Babbitt's system of military ranks. Quickened
by this spiritual refreshment, it had a boom. It did not become the
largest school in Zenith--the Central Methodist Church kept ahead of it
by methods which Dr. Drew scored as "unfair, undignified, un-American,
ungentlemanly, and unchristian"--but it climbed from fourth place to
second, and there was rejoicing in heaven, or at least in that portion
of heaven included in the parsonage of Dr. Drew, while Babbitt had much
praise and good repute.

He had received the rank of colonel on the general staff of the school.
He was plumply pleased by salutes on the street from unknown small
boys; his ears were tickled to ruddy ecstasy by hearing himself called
"Colonel;" and if he did not attend Sunday School merely to be thus
exalted, certainly he thought about it all the way there.

He was particularly pleasant to the press-agent, Kenneth Escott; he took
him to lunch at the Athletic Club and had him at the house for dinner.

Like many of the cocksure young men who forage about cities in apparent
contentment and who express their cynicism in supercilious slang, Escott
was shy and lonely. His shrewd starveling face broadened with joy at
dinner, and he blurted, "Gee whillikins, Mrs. Babbitt, if you knew how
good it is to have home eats again!"

Escott and Verona liked each other. All evening they "talked about
ideas." They discovered that they were Radicals. True, they were
sensible about it. They agreed that all communists were criminals;
that this vers libre was tommy-rot; and that while there ought to be
universal disarmament, of course Great Britain and the United States
must, on behalf of oppressed small nations