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.
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-cycles, poured by; on the farther
corner, pneumatic riveters rang on the sun-plated skeleton
of a new building; and out of this tornado flashed
the inspiration of a familiar face, and a fellow Booster
shouted, “H’ are you, George!” Babbitt
waved in neighborly affection, and slid on with the
traffic as the policeman lifted his hand. He
noted how quickly his car picked up. He felt
superior and powerful, like a shuttle of polished steel
darting in a vast machine.
As always he ignored the next two blocks, decayed
blocks not yet reclaimed from the grime and shabbiness
of the Zenith of 1885. While he was passing the
five-and-ten-cent store, the Dakota Lodging House,
Concordia Hall with its lodge-rooms and the offices
of fortune-tellers and chiropractors, he thought of
how much money he made, and he boasted a little and
worried a little and did old familiar sums:
