the Glen we better stick to the
more dignified approach, see how I mean? Well, I guess that's all, this
morning, Chet."
II
By a tragedy familiar to the world of art, the April enthusiasm of Chet
Laylock served only to stimulate the talent of the older craftsman,
George F. Babbitt. He grumbled to Stanley Graff, "That tan-colored voice
of Chet's gets on my nerves," yet he was aroused and in one swoop he
wrote:
DO YOU RESPECT YOUR LOVED ONES?
When the last sad rites of bereavement are over, do you know for certain
that you have done your best for the Departed? You haven't unless they
lie in the Cemetery Beautiful,
LINDEN LANE
the only strictly up-to-date burial place in or near Zenith, where
exquisitely gardened plots look from daisy-dotted hill-slopes across the
smiling fields of Dorchester.
Sole agents
BABBITT-THOMPSON REALTY COMPANY
Reeves Building
He rejoiced, "I guess that'll show Chan Mott and his weedy old Wildwood
Cemetery something about modern merchandizing!"
III
He sent Mat Penniman to the recorder's office to dig out the names
of the owners of houses which were displaying For Rent signs of other
brokers; he talked to a man who desired to lease a store-building for
a pool-room; he ran over the list of home-leases which were about to
expire; he sent Thomas Bywaters, a street-car conductor who played at
real estate in spare time, to call on side-street "prospects" who were
unworthy the strategies of Stanley Graff. But he had spent his credulous
excitement of creation, and these routine details annoyed him. One
moment of heroism he had, in discovering a new way of stopping smoking.
He stopped smoking at least once a month. He went through with it like
the solid citizen he was: admitted the evils of tobacco, courageously
made resolves, laid out plans to check the vice, tapered off his
allowance of cigars, and expounded the pleasures of virtuousness to
every one he met. He did everything, in fact, except stop smoking.
Two months before, by ruling out a schedule, noting down the hour and
minute of each smoke, and ecstatically increasing the intervals between
smokes, he had brought himself down to three cigars a day. Then he had
lost the schedule.
A week ago he had invented a system of leaving his cigar-case
and cigarette-box in an unused drawer at the bottom of the
correspondence-file, in the outer office. "I'll just naturally be
ashamed to go poking in there all day
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