everish a pace that he seemed to
dance with fury as he entered the orb of glow from a street-lamp. At
each step he brandished his stick and brought it down with a crash. His
glasses on their broad pretentious ribbon banged against his stomach.
Babbitt incredulously saw that it was Chum Frink.

Frink stopped, focused his vision, and spoke with gravity:

"There's another fool. George Babbitt. Lives for renting
howshes--houses. Know who I am? I'm traitor to poetry. I'm drunk. I'm
talking too much. I don't care. Know what I could 've been? I could 've
been a Gene Field or a James Whitcomb Riley. Maybe a Stevenson.
I could 've. Whimsies. 'Magination. Lissen. Lissen to this. Just
made it up:

Glittering summery meadowy noise
Of beetles and bums and respectable boys.

Hear that? Whimzh--whimsy. I made that up. I don't know what it means!
Beginning good verse. Chile's Garden Verses. And whadi write? Tripe!
Cheer-up poems. All tripe! Could have written--Too late!"

He darted on with an alarming plunge, seeming always to pitch forward
yet never quite falling. Babbitt would have been no more astonished
and no less had a ghost skipped out of the fog carrying his head.
He accepted Frink with vast apathy; he grunted, "Poor boob!" and
straightway forgot him.

He plodded into the house, deliberately went to the refrigerator and
rifled it. When Mrs. Babbitt was at home, this was one of the major
household crimes. He stood before the covered laundry tubs, eating a
chicken leg and half a saucer of raspberry jelly, and grumbling over a
clammy cold boiled potato. He was thinking. It was coming to him that
perhaps all life as he knew it and vigorously practised it was futile;
that heaven as portrayed by the Reverend Dr. John Jennison Drew was
neither probable nor very interesting; that he hadn't much pleasure out
of making money; that it was of doubtful worth to rear children merely
that they might rear children who would rear children. What was it all
about? What did he want?

He blundered into the living-room, lay on the davenport, hands behind
his head.

What did he want? Wealth? Social position? Travel? Servants? Yes, but
only incidentally.

"I give it up," he sighed.

But he did know that he wanted the presence of Paul Riesling; and from
that he stumbled into the admission that he wanted the fairy girl--in
the flesh. If there had been a woman whom he loved, he would have fled
to her, humbled his forehead on her k