ut of
town. And me--you're right, Babbitt, I've been going crooked, but now
I'm going straight, and the first step will be to get a job in some
office where the boss doesn't talk about Ideals. Bad luck, old dear, and
you can stick your job up the sewer!"

Babbitt sat for a long time, alternately raging, "I'll have him
arrested," and yearning "I wonder--No, I've never done anything that
wasn't necessary to keep the Wheels of Progress moving."

Next day he hired in Graff's place Fritz Weilinger, the salesman of his
most injurious rival, the East Side Homes and Development Company, and
thus at once annoyed his competitor and acquired an excellent man.
Young Fritz was a curly-headed, merry, tennis-playing youngster. He made
customers welcome to the office. Babbitt thought of him as a son, and in
him had much comfort.

III

An abandoned race-track on the outskirts of Chicago, a plot excellent
for factory sites, was to be sold, and Jake Offut asked Babbitt to
bid on it for him. The strain of the Street Traction deal and his
disappointment in Stanley Graff had so shaken Babbitt that he found
it hard to sit at his desk and concentrate. He proposed to his family,
"Look here, folks! Do you know who's going to trot up to Chicago for a
couple of days--just week-end; won't lose but one day of school--know
who's going with that celebrated business-ambassador, George F. Babbitt?
Why, Mr. Theodore Roosevelt Babbitt!"

"Hurray!" Ted shouted, and "Oh, maybe the Babbitt men won't paint that
lil ole town red!"

And, once away from the familiar implications of home, they were two men
together. Ted was young only in his assumption of oldness, and the only
realms, apparently, in which Babbitt had a larger and more grown-up
knowledge than Ted's were the details of real estate and the phrases of
politics. When the other sages of the Pullman smoking-compartment had
left them to themselves, Babbitt's voice did not drop into the playful
and otherwise offensive tone in which one addresses children but
continued its overwhelming and monotonous rumble, and Ted tried to
imitate it in his strident tenor:

"Gee, dad, you certainly did show up that poor boot when he got flip
about the League of Nations!"

"Well, the trouble with a lot of these fellows is, they simply don't
know what they're talking about. They don't get down to facts.... What
do you think of Ken Escott?"

"I'll tell you, dad: it strikes me Ken is a nice lad; no special faul