nees.

He thought of his stenographer, Miss McGoun. He thought of the prettiest
of the manicure girls at the Hotel Thornleigh barber shop. As he fell
asleep on the davenport he felt that he had found something in life, and
that he had made a terrifying, thrilling break with everything that was
decent and normal.

II

He had forgotten, next morning, that he was a conscious rebel, but he
was irritable in the office and at the eleven o'clock drive of telephone
calls and visitors he did something he had often desired and never
dared: he left the office without excuses to those stave-drivers his
employees, and went to the movies. He enjoyed the right to be alone. He
came out with a vicious determination to do what he pleased.

As he approached the Roughnecks' Table at the club, everybody laughed.

"Well, here's the millionaire!" said Sidney Finkelstein.

"Yes, I saw him in his Locomobile!" said Professor Pumphrey.

"Gosh, it must be great to be a smart guy like Georgie!" moaned Vergil
Gunch. "He's probably stolen all of Dorchester. I'd hate to leave a poor
little defenseless piece of property lying around where he could get his
hooks on it!"

They had, Babbitt perceived, "something on him." Also, they "had their
kidding clothes on." Ordinarily he would have been delighted at the
honor implied in being chaffed, but he was suddenly touchy. He grunted,
"Yuh, sure; maybe I'll take you guys on as office boys!" He was
impatient as the jest elaborately rolled on to its denouement.

"Of course he may have been meeting a girl," they said, and "No, I think
he was waiting for his old roommate, Sir Jerusalem Doak."

He exploded, "Oh, spring it, spring it, you boneheads! What's the great
joke?"

"Hurray! George is peeved!" snickered Sidney Finkelstein, while a grin
went round the table. Gunch revealed the shocking truth: He had seen
Babbitt coming out of a motion-picture theater--at noon!

They kept it up. With a hundred variations, a hundred guffaws, they said
that he had gone to the movies during business-hours. He didn't so much
mind Gunch, but he was annoyed by Sidney Finkelstein, that brisk, lean,
red-headed explainer of jokes. He was bothered, too, by the lump of ice
in his glass of water. It was too large; it spun round and burned his
nose when he tried to drink. He raged that Finkelstein was like that
lump of ice. But he won through; he kept up his banter till they grew
tired of the superlative jest and turned to