Babbitt sat for a long time, alternately raging, “I’ll
have him arrested,” and yearning “I wonder—No,
I’ve never done anything that wasn’t necessary
to keep the Wheels of Progress moving.”
Next day he hired in Graff’s place Fritz Weilinger,
the salesman of his most injurious rival, the East
Side Homes and Development Company, and thus at once
annoyed his competitor and acquired an excellent man.
Young Fritz was a curly-headed, merry, tennis-playing
youngster. He made customers welcome to the office.
Babbitt thought of him as a son, and in him had much
comfort.
An abandoned race-track on the outskirts of Chicago,
a plot excellent for factory sites, was to be sold,
and Jake Offut asked Babbitt to bid on it for him.
The strain of the Street Traction deal and his disappointment
in Stanley Graff had so shaken Babbitt that he found
it hard to sit at his desk and concentrate. He
proposed to his family, “Look here, folks!
Do you know who’s going to trot up to Chicago
for a couple of days—just week-end; won’t
lose but one day of school—know who’s
going with that celebrated business-ambassador, George
F. Babbitt? Why, Mr. Theodore Roosevelt Babbitt!”
“Hurray!” Ted shouted, and “Oh,
maybe the Babbitt men won’t paint that lil ole
town red!”
And, once away from the familiar implications of home,
they were two men together. Ted was young only
in his assumption of oldness, and the only realms,
apparently, in which Babbitt had a larger and more
grown-up knowledge than Ted’s were the details
of real estate and the phrases of politics. When
the other sages of the Pullman smoking-compartment
had left them to themselves, Babbitt’s voice
did not drop into the playful and otherwise offensive
tone in which one addresses children but continued
its overwhelming and monotonous rumble, and Ted tried
to imitate it in his strident tenor:
“Gee, dad, you certainly did show up that poor
boot when he got flip about the League of Nations!”
“Well, the trouble with a lot of these fellows
is, they simply don’t know what they’re
talking about. They don’t get down to facts....
What do you think of Ken Escott?”
“I’ll tell you, dad: it strikes me
Ken is a nice lad; no special faults except he smokes
too much; but slow, Lord! Why, if we don’t
give him a shove the poor dumb-bell never will propose!
And Rone just as bad. Slow.”
“Yes, I guess you’re right. They’re
slow. They haven’t either one of ’em
got our pep.”
“That’s right. They’re slow.
I swear, dad, I don’t know how Rone got into
our family! I’ll bet, if the truth were
known, you were a bad old egg when you were a kid!”
“Well, I wasn’t so slow!”
“I’ll bet you weren’t! I’ll
bet you didn’t miss many tricks!”
“Well, when I was out with the girls I didn’t
spend all the time telling ’em about the strike
in the knitting industry!”
