were heard again, immediately.

Stanley Graff, the outside salesman, was talking on the telephone with
tragic lack of that firm manner which disciplines clients: "Say, uh, I
think I got just the house that would suit you--the Percival House, in
Linton.... Oh, you've seen it. Well, how'd it strike you?... Huh?
...Oh," irresolutely, "oh, I see."

As Babbitt marched into his private room, a coop with semi-partition of
oak and frosted glass, at the back of the office, he reflected how hard
it was to find employees who had his own faith that he was going to make
sales.

There were nine members of the staff, besides Babbitt and his partner
and father-in-law, Henry Thompson, who rarely came to the office. The
nine were Stanley Graff, the outside salesman--a youngish man given to
cigarettes and the playing of pool; old Mat Penniman, general utility
man, collector of rents and salesman of insurance--broken, silent, gray;
a mystery, reputed to have been a "crack" real-estate man with a firm
of his own in haughty Brooklyn; Chester Kirby Laylock, resident salesman
out at the Glen Oriole acreage development--an enthusiastic person with
a silky mustache and much family; Miss Theresa McGoun, the swift and
rather pretty stenographer; Miss Wilberta Bannigan, the thick, slow,
laborious accountant and file-clerk; and four freelance part-time
commission salesmen.

As he looked from his own cage into the main room Babbitt mourned,
"McGoun's a good stenog., smart's a whip, but Stan Graff and all those
bums--" The zest of the spring morning was smothered in the stale office
air.

Normally he admired the office, with a pleased surprise that he should
have created this sure lovely thing; normally he was stimulated by
the clean newness of it and the air of bustle; but to-day it seemed
flat--the tiled floor, like a bathroom, the ocher-colored metal ceiling,
the faded maps on the hard plaster walls, the chairs of varnished pale
oak, the desks and filing-cabinets of steel painted in olive drab. It
was a vault, a steel chapel where loafing and laughter were raw sin.

He hadn't even any satisfaction in the new water-cooler! And it was the
very best of water-coolers, up-to-date, scientific, and right-thinking.
It had cost a great deal of money (in itself a virtue). It possessed a
non-conducting fiber ice-container, a porcelain water-jar (guaranteed
hygienic), a drip-less non-clogging sanitary faucet, and machine-painted
decorations in two tone