Babbitt had growled to him, “Makes me tired
the way these doctors and profs and preachers put
on lugs about being ‘professional men.’
A good realtor has to have more knowledge and finesse
than any of ’em.”
“Right you are! I say: Why don’t
you put that into a paper, and give it at the S. A.
R. E. B.?” suggested Rountree.
“Well, if it would help you in making up the
program—Tell you: the way I look at
it is this: First place, we ought to insist that
folks call us ‘realtors’ and not ‘real-estate
men.’ Sounds more like a reg’lar
profession. Second place—What is it
distinguishes a profession from a mere trade, business,
or occupation? What is it? Why, it’s
the public service and the skill, the trained skill,
and the knowledge and, uh, all that, whereas a fellow
that merely goes out for the jack, he never considers
the-public service and trained skill and so on.
Now as a professional—”
“Rather! That’s perfectly bully!
Perfectly corking! Now you write it in a paper,”
said Rountree, as he rapidly and firmly moved away.
However accustomed to the literary labors of advertisements
and correspondence, Babbitt was dismayed on the evening
when he sat down to prepare a paper which would take
a whole ten minutes to read.
He laid out a new fifteen-cent school exercise-book
on his wife’s collapsible sewing-table, set
up for the event in the living-room. The household
had been bullied into silence; Verona and Ted requested
to disappear, and Tinka threatened with “If
I hear one sound out of you—if you holler
for a glass of water one single solitary time—You
better not, that’s all!” Mrs. Babbitt
sat over by the piano, making a nightgown and gazing
with respect while Babbitt wrote in the exercise-book,
to the rhythmical wiggling and squeaking of the sewing-table.
When he rose, damp and jumpy, and his throat dusty
from cigarettes, she marveled, “I don’t
see how you can just sit down and make up things right
out of your own head!”
“Oh, it’s the training in constructive
imagination that a fellow gets in modern business
life.”
He had written seven pages, whereof the first page
set forth:
{illustration omitted: consists of several doodles
and “(1) a profession (2) Not just a trade crossed
out (3) Skill & vision (3) Shd be called “realtor”
& not just real est man”}
The other six pages were rather like the first.
For a week he went about looking important. Every
morning, as he dressed, he thought aloud: “Jever
stop to consider, Myra, that before a town can have
buildings or prosperity or any of those things, some
realtor has got to sell ’em the land? All
civilization starts with him. Jever realize that?”
At the Athletic Club he led unwilling men aside to
inquire, “Say, if you had to read a paper before
a big convention, would you start in with the funny
stories or just kind of scatter ’em all through?”
He asked Howard Littlefield for a “set of statistics
about real-estate sales; something good and impressive,”
and Littlefield provided something exceedingly good
and impressive.
