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 knees.
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 slave-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 the great problems of the day.
He reflected, “What’s the matter with me to-day?
Seems like I’ve got an awful grouch.
Only they talk so darn much.
But I better steer careful and keep my mouth shut.”