into
it. Ahead, another car was leaving the curb, and Babbitt slowed up,
holding out his hand to the cars pressing on him from behind, agitatedly
motioning an old woman to go ahead, avoiding a truck which bore down on
him from one side. With front wheels nicking the wrought-steel bumper
of the car in front, he stopped, feverishly cramped his steering-wheel,
slid back into the vacant space and, with eighteen inches of room,
manoeuvered to bring the car level with the curb. It was a virile
adventure masterfully executed. With satisfaction he locked a
thief-proof steel wedge on the front wheel, and crossed the street to
his real-estate office on the ground floor of the Reeves Building.

The Reeves Building was as fireproof as a rock and as efficient as
a typewriter; fourteen stories of yellow pressed brick, with clean,
upright, unornamented lines. It was filled with the offices of lawyers,
doctors, agents for machinery, for emery wheels, for wire fencing, for
mining-stock. Their gold signs shone on the windows. The entrance was
too modern to be flamboyant with pillars; it was quiet, shrewd, neat.
Along the Third Street side were a Western Union Telegraph Office,
the Blue Delft Candy Shop, Shotwell's Stationery Shop, and the
Babbitt-Thompson Realty Company.

Babbitt could have entered his office from the street, as customers
did, but it made him feel an insider to go through the corridor of
the building and enter by the back door. Thus he was greeted by the
villagers.

The little unknown people who inhabited the Reeves Building
corridors--elevator-runners, starter, engineers, superintendent, and the
doubtful-looking lame man who conducted the news and cigar stand--were
in no way city-dwellers. They were rustics, living in a constricted
valley, interested only in one another and in The Building. Their
Main Street was the entrance hall, with its stone floor, severe marble
ceiling, and the inner windows of the shops. The liveliest place on the
street was the Reeves Building Barber Shop, but this was also Babbitt's
one embarrassment. Himself, he patronized the glittering Pompeian
Barber Shop in the Hotel Thornleigh, and every time he passed the
Reeves shop--ten times a day, a hundred times--he felt untrue to his own
village.

Now, as one of the squirearchy, greeted with honorable salutations by
the villagers, he marched into his office, and peace and dignity were
upon him, and the morning's dissonances all unheard.

They