on't care! Good for her to get waked up a little. And I'm going to keep
free. Of her and Tanis and the fellows at the club and everybody. I'm
going to run my own life!"

II

In this mood he was particularly objectionable at the Boosters' Club
lunch next day. They were addressed by a congressman who had just
returned from an exhaustive three-months study of the finances,
ethnology, political systems, linguistic divisions, mineral resources,
and agriculture of Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy, Austria,
Czechoslovakia, Jugoslavia, and Bulgaria. He told them all about
those subjects, together with three funny stories about European
misconceptions of America and some spirited words on the necessity of
keeping ignorant foreigners out of America.

"Say, that was a mighty informative talk. Real he-stuff," said Sidney
Finkelstein.

But the disaffected Babbitt grumbled, "Four-flusher! Bunch of hot
air! And what's the matter with the immigrants? Gosh, they aren't
all ignorant, and I got a hunch we're all descended from immigrants
ourselves."

"Oh, you make me tired!" said Mr. Finkelstein.

Babbitt was aware that Dr. A. I. Dilling was sternly listening from
across the table. Dr. Dilling was one of the most important men in the
Boosters'. He was not a physician but a surgeon, a more romantic and
sounding occupation. He was an intense large man with a boiling of black
hair and a thick black mustache. The newspapers often chronicled his
operations; he was professor of surgery in the State University; he went
to dinner at the very best houses on Royal Ridge; and he was said to be
worth several hundred thousand dollars. It was dismaying to Babbitt to
have such a person glower at him. He hastily praised the congressman's
wit, to Sidney Finkelstein, but for Dr. Dilling's benefit.

III

That afternoon three men shouldered into Babbitt's office with the air
of a Vigilante committee in frontier days. They were large, resolute,
big-jawed men, and they were all high lords in the land of Zenith--Dr.
Dilling the surgeon, Charles McKelvey the contractor, and, most
dismaying of all, the white-bearded Colonel Rutherford Snow, owner of
the Advocate-Times. In their whelming presence Babbitt felt small and
insignificant.

"Well, well, great pleasure, have chairs, what c'n I do for you?" he
babbled.

They neither sat nor offered observations on the weather.

"Babbitt," said Colonel Snow, "we've come from the Good Citizens'
Leag