apartment-house
doors.

He discovered that he was smoking another cigar. He threw it away,
protesting, "Darn it, I thought you'd quit this darn smoking!" He
courageously returned the cigar-box to the correspondence-file, locked
it up, hid the key in a more difficult place, and raged, "Ought to take
care of myself. And need more exercise--walk to the club, every single
noon--just what I'll do--every noon-cut out this motoring all the time."

The resolution made him feel exemplary. Immediately after it he decided
that this noon it was too late to walk.

It took but little more time to start his car and edge it into the
traffic than it would have taken to walk the three and a half blocks to
the club.

II

As he drove he glanced with the fondness of familiarity at the
buildings.

A stranger suddenly dropped into the business-center of Zenith could not
have told whether he was in a city of Oregon or Georgia, Ohio or Maine,
Oklahoma or Manitoba. But to Babbitt every inch was individual and
stirring. As always he noted that the California Building across the way
was three stories lower, therefore three stories less beautiful, than
his own Reeves Building. As always when he passed the Parthenon Shoe
Shine Parlor, a one-story hut which beside the granite and red-brick
ponderousness of the old California Building resembled a bath-house
under a cliff, he commented, "Gosh, ought to get my shoes shined this
afternoon. Keep forgetting it." At the Simplex Office Furniture Shop,
the National Cash Register Agency, he yearned for a dictaphone, for a
typewriter which would add and multiply, as a poet yearns for quartos or
a physician for radium.

At the Nobby Men's Wear Shop he took his left hand off the
steering-wheel to touch his scarf, and thought well of himself as one
who bought expensive ties "and could pay cash for 'em, too, by golly;"
and at the United Cigar Store, with its crimson and gold alertness, he
reflected, "Wonder if I need some cigars--idiot--plumb forgot--going
t' cut down my fool smoking." He looked at his bank, the Miners' and
Drovers' National, and considered how clever and solid he was to bank
with so marbled an establishment. His high moment came in the clash
of traffic when he was halted at the corner beneath the lofty Second
National Tower. His car was banked with four others in a line of steel
restless as cavalry, while the cross town traffic, limousines and
enormous moving-vans and insistent motor-