chest, Babbitt and Ted gravely considered colleges.
They arrived at Chicago late at night; they lay abed in the morning,
rejoicing, "Pretty nice not to have to get up and get down to breakfast,
heh?" They were staying at the modest Eden Hotel, because Zenith
business men always stayed at the Eden, but they had dinner in the
brocade and crystal Versailles Room of the Regency Hotel. Babbitt
ordered Blue Point oysters with cocktail sauce, a tremendous steak with
a tremendous platter of French fried potatoes, two pots of coffee, apple
pie with ice cream for both of them and, for Ted, an extra piece of
mince pie.

"Hot stuff! Some feed, young fella!" Ted admired.

"Huh! You stick around with me, old man, and I'll show you a good time!"

They went to a musical comedy and nudged each other at the matrimonial
jokes and the prohibition jokes; they paraded the lobby, arm in arm,
between acts, and in the glee of his first release from the shame which
dissevers fathers and sons Ted chuckled, "Dad, did you ever hear the one
about the three milliners and the judge?"

When Ted had returned to Zenith, Babbitt was lonely. As he was trying
to make alliance between Offutt and certain Milwaukee interests which
wanted the race-track plot, most of his time was taken up in waiting for
telephone calls.... Sitting on the edge of his bed, holding the portable
telephone, asking wearily, "Mr. Sagen not in yet? Didn' he leave any
message for me? All right, I'll hold the wire." Staring at a stain on
the wall, reflecting that it resembled a shoe, and being bored by this
twentieth discovery that it resembled a shoe. Lighting a cigarette;
then, bound to the telephone with no ashtray in reach, wondering what
to do with this burning menace and anxiously trying to toss it into the
tiled bathroom. At last, on the telephone, "No message, eh? All right,
I'll call up again."

One afternoon he wandered through snow-rutted streets of which he
had never heard, streets of small tenements and two-family houses and
marooned cottages. It came to him that he had nothing to do, that there
was nothing he wanted to do. He was bleakly lonely in the evening, when
he dined by himself at the Regency Hotel. He sat in the lobby afterward,
in a plush chair bedecked with the Saxe-Coburg arms, lighting a cigar
and looking for some one who would come and play with him and save him
from thinking. In the chair next to him (showing the arms of Lithuania)
was a half-familiar man