SILVER GROVE.—Cute four-room California bungalow, a.m.i., garage, dandy shade tree, swell neighborhood, handy car line. $3700, $780 down and balance liberal, Babbitt-Thompson terms, cheaper than rent.
DORCHESTER.—A corker!
Artistic two-family house, all oak trim, parquet floors, lovely gas log, big porches, colonial, HEATED ALL-WEATHER GARAGE, a bargain at $11,250.
Dictation over, with its need of sitting and thinking instead of bustling around and making a noise and really doing something, Babbitt sat creakily back in his revolving desk-chair and beamed on Miss McGoun.
He was conscious of her as a girl, of black bobbed hair against demure cheeks.
A longing which was indistinguishable from loneliness enfeebled him.
While she waited, tapping a long, precise pencil-point on the desk-tablet, he half identified her with the fairy girl of his dreams.
He imagined their eyes meeting with terrifying recognition; imagined touching her lips with frightened reverence and—She was chirping, “Any more, Mist’ Babbitt?” He grunted,
“That winds it up, I guess,” and turned heavily away.
For all his wandering thoughts, they had never been more intimate than this.
He often reflected,
“Nev’ forget how old Jake Offutt said a wise bird never goes love-making in his own office or his own home.
Start trouble. Sure.
But—”
In twenty-three years of married life he had peered uneasily at every graceful ankle, every soft shoulder; in thought he had treasured them; but not once had he hazarded respectability by adventuring.
Now, as he calculated the cost of repapering the Styles house, he was restless again, discontented about nothing and everything, ashamed of his discontentment, and lonely for the fairy girl.
CHAPTER IV
IT was a morning of artistic creation.
Fifteen minutes after the purple prose of Babbitt’s form-letter, Chester Kirby Laylock, the resident salesman at Glen Oriole, came in to report a sale and submit an advertisement.
Babbitt disapproved of Laylock, who sang in choirs and was merry at home over games of Hearts and Old Maid.
He had a tenor voice, wavy chestnut hair, and a mustache like a camel’s-hair brush.
Babbitt considered it excusable in a family-man to growl,
“Seen this new picture of the kid—husky little devil, eh?” but Laylock’s domestic confidences were as bubbling as a girl’s.
“Say, I think I got a peach of an ad for the Glen, Mr. Babbitt.
Why don’t we try something in poetry?
Honest, it’d have wonderful pulling-power.
Listen:
‘Mid pleasures and palaces, Wherever you may roam, You just provide the little bride And we’ll provide the home.
Do you get it?
See—like
‘Home Sweet Home.’
Don’t you—”
“Yes, yes, yes, hell yes, of course I get it.
But—Oh, I think we’d better use something more dignified and forceful, like
‘We lead, others follow,’ or
‘Eventually, why not now?’
Course I believe in using poetry and humor and all that junk when it turns the trick, but with a high-class restricted development like 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.