ion of the New York State
Assembly. It was not till Babbitt was thick and disconsolate with mutton
grease that he flung out:

"I wound up a nice little deal with Conrad Lyte this morning that put
five hundred good round plunks in my pocket. Pretty nice--pretty nice!
And yet--I don't know what's the matter with me to-day. Maybe it's an
attack of spring fever, or staying up too late at Verg Gunch's, or maybe
it's just the winter's work piling up, but I've felt kind of down in the
mouth all day long. Course I wouldn't beef about it to the fellows at
the Roughnecks' Table there, but you--Ever feel that way, Paul? Kind
of comes over me: here I've pretty much done all the things I ought to;
supported my family, and got a good house and a six-cylinder car, and
built up a nice little business, and I haven't any vices 'specially,
except smoking--and I'm practically cutting that out, by the way. And I
belong to the church, and play enough golf to keep in trim, and I only
associate with good decent fellows. And yet, even so, I don't know that
I'm entirely satisfied!"

It was drawled out, broken by shouts from the neighboring tables, by
mechanical love-making to the waitress, by stertorous grunts as the
coffee filled him with dizziness and indigestion. He was apologetic and
doubtful, and it was Paul, with his thin voice, who pierced the fog:

"Good Lord, George, you don't suppose it's any novelty to me to find
that we hustlers, that think we're so all-fired successful, aren't
getting much out of it? You look as if you expected me to report you as
seditious! You know what my own life's been."

"I know, old man."

"I ought to have been a fiddler, and I'm a pedler of tar-roofing! And
Zilla--Oh, I don't want to squeal, but you know as well as I do about
how inspiring a wife she is.... Typical instance last evening: We went
to the movies. There was a big crowd waiting in the lobby, us at the
tail-end. She began to push right through it with her 'Sir, how dare
you?' manner--Honestly, sometimes when I look at her and see how she's
always so made up and stinking of perfume and looking for trouble and
kind of always yelping, 'I tell yuh I'm a lady, damn yuh!'--why, I want
to kill her! Well, she keeps elbowing through the crowd, me after her,
feeling good and ashamed, till she's almost up to the velvet rope and
ready to be the next let in. But there was a little squirt of a man
there--probably been waiting half an hour--I kind of admire