aiter would give them a
discreet place behind a pillar, but they were stationed on the center
aisle. Tanis seemed not to notice her admirers; she smiled at Babbitt
with a lavish "Oh, isn't this nice! What a peppy-looking orchestra!"
Babbitt had difficulty in being lavish in return, for two tables away he
saw Vergil Gunch. All through the meal Gunch watched them, while Babbitt
watched himself being watched and lugubriously tried to keep from
spoiling Tanis's gaiety. "I felt like a spree to-day," she rippled. "I
love the Thornleigh, don't you? It's so live and yet so--so refined."

He made talk about the Thornleigh, the service, the food, the people he
recognized in the restaurant, all but Vergil Gunch. There did not
seem to be anything else to talk of. He smiled conscientiously at her
fluttering jests; he agreed with her that Minnie Sonntag was "so hard to
get along with," and young Pete "such a silly lazy kid, really just no
good at all." But he himself had nothing to say. He considered telling
her his worries about Gunch, but--"oh, gosh, it was too much work to go
into the whole thing and explain about Verg and everything."

He was relieved when he put Tanis on a trolley; he was cheerful in the
familiar simplicities of his office.

At four o'clock Vergil Gunch called on him.

Babbitt was agitated, but Gunch began in a friendly way:

"How's the boy? Say, some of us are getting up a scheme we'd kind of
like to have you come in on."

"Fine, Verg. Shoot."

"You know during the war we had the Undesirable Element, the Reds and
walking delegates and just the plain common grouches, dead to rights,
and so did we for quite a while after the war, but folks forget about
the danger and that gives these cranks a chance to begin working
underground again, especially a lot of these parlor socialists. Well,
it's up to the folks that do a little sound thinking to make a conscious
effort to keep bucking these fellows. Some guy back East has organized
a society called the Good Citizens' League for just that purpose. Of
course the Chamber of Commerce and the American Legion and so on do
a fine work in keeping the decent people in the saddle, but they're
devoted to so many other causes that they can't attend to this one
problem properly. But the Good Citizens' League, the G. C. L., they
stick right to it. Oh, the G. C. L. has to have some other ostensible
purposes--frinstance here in Zenith I think it ought to support the
park-exten