“Wish there were more folks that were so generous with their machines,” dutifully said the victim of benevolence.  “Oh, no, ’tain’t a question of generosity, hardly.  Fact, I always feel—­I was saying to my son just the other night—­it’s a fellow’s duty to share the good things of this world with his neighbors, and it gets my goat when a fellow gets stuck on himself and goes around tooting his horn merely because he’s charitable.”

The victim seemed unable to find the right answer.  Babbitt boomed on: 

“Pretty punk service the Company giving us on these car-lines.  Nonsense to only run the Portland Road cars once every seven minutes.  Fellow gets mighty cold on a winter morning, waiting on a street corner with the wind nipping at his ankles.”

“That’s right.  The Street Car Company don’t care a damn what kind of a deal they give us.  Something ought to happen to ’em.”

Babbitt was alarmed.  “But still, of course it won’t do to just keep knocking the Traction Company and not realize the difficulties they’re operating under, like these cranks that want municipal ownership.  The way these workmen hold up the Company for high wages is simply a crime, and of course the burden falls on you and me that have to pay a seven-cent fare!  Fact, there’s remarkable service on all their lines—­considering.”

“Well—­” uneasily.

“Darn fine morning,” Babbitt explained.  “Spring coming along fast.”

“Yes, it’s real spring now.”

The victim had no originality, no wit, and Babbitt fell into a great silence and 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.