d devoted himself to the game of beating trolley cars to the
corner: a spurt, a tail-chase, nervous speeding between the huge yellow
side of the trolley and the jagged row of parked motors, shooting past
just as the trolley stopped--a rare game and valiant.

And all the while he was conscious of the loveliness of Zenith. For
weeks together he noticed nothing but clients and the vexing To Rent
signs of rival brokers. To-day, in mysterious malaise, he raged or
rejoiced with equal nervous swiftness, and to-day the light of spring
was so winsome that he lifted his head and saw.

He admired each district along his familiar route to the office: The
bungalows and shrubs and winding irregular drive ways of Floral Heights.
The one-story shops on Smith Street, a glare of plate-glass and new
yellow brick; groceries and laundries and drug-stores to supply the more
immediate needs of East Side housewives. The market gardens in Dutch
Hollow, their shanties patched with corrugated iron and stolen doors.
Billboards with crimson goddesses nine feet tall advertising cinema
films, pipe tobacco, and talcum powder. The old "mansions" along Ninth
Street, S. E., like aged dandies in filthy linen; wooden castles turned
into boarding-houses, with muddy walks and rusty hedges, jostled
by fast-intruding garages, cheap apartment-houses, and fruit-stands
conducted by bland, sleek Athenians. Across the belt of railroad-tracks,
factories with high-perched water-tanks and tall stacks-factories
producing condensed milk, paper boxes, lighting-fixtures, motor cars.
Then the business center, the thickening darting traffic, the crammed
trolleys unloading, and high doorways of marble and polished granite.

It was big--and Babbitt respected bigness in anything; in mountains,
jewels, muscles, wealth, or words. He was, for a spring-enchanted
moment, the lyric and almost unselfish lover of Zenith. He thought of
the outlying factory suburbs; of the Chaloosa River with its strangely
eroded banks; of the orchard-dappled Tonawanda Hills to the North,
and all the fat dairy land and big barns and comfortable herds. As he
dropped his passenger he cried, "Gosh, I feel pretty good this morning!"
III

Epochal as starting the car was the drama of parking it before he
entered his office. As he turned from Oberlin Avenue round the corner
into Third Street, N.E., he peered ahead for a space in the line of
parked cars. He angrily just missed a space as a rival driver slid