“So,” Elbert Wing was droning, “I
hired this shop-window for a week, and put up a big
sign, ‘Toy Town for Tiny Tots,’ and stuck
in a lot of doll houses and some dinky little trees,
and then down at the bottom, ’Baby Likes This
Dollydale, but Papa and Mama Will Prefer Our Beautiful
Bungalows,’ and you know, that certainly got
folks talking, and first week we sold—”
The trucks sang “lickety-lick, lickety-lick”
as the train ran through the factory district.
Furnaces spurted flame, and power-hammers were clanging.
Red lights, green lights, furious white lights rushed
past, and Babbitt was important again, and eager.
He did a voluptuous thing: he had his clothes
pressed on the train. In the morning, half an
hour before they reached Monarch, the porter came
to his berth and whispered, “There’s a
drawing-room vacant, sir. I put your suit in
there.” In tan autumn overcoat over his
pajamas, Babbitt slipped down the green-curtain-lined
aisle to the glory of his first private compartment.
The porter indicated that he knew Babbitt was used
to a man-servant; he held the ends of Babbitt’s
trousers, that the beautifully sponged garment might
not be soiled, filled the bowl in the private washroom,
and waited with a towel.
To have a private washroom was luxurious. However
enlivening a Pullman smoking-compartment was by night,
even to Babbitt it was depressing in the morning,
when it was jammed with fat men in woolen undershirts,
every hook filled with wrinkled cottony shirts, the
leather seat piled with dingy toilet-kits, and the
air nauseating with the smell of soap and toothpaste.
Babbitt did not ordinarily think much of privacy, but
now he reveled in it, reveled in his valet, and purred
with pleasure as he gave the man a tip of a dollar
and a half.
He rather hoped that he was being noticed as, in his
newly pressed clothes, with the adoring porter carrying
his suit-case, he disembarked at Monarch.
He was to share a room at the Hotel Sedgwick with
W. A. Rogers, that shrewd, rustic-looking Zenith dealer
in farm-lands. Together they had a noble breakfast,
with waffles, and coffee not in exiguous cups but
in large pots. Babbitt grew expansive, and told
Rogers about the art of writing; he gave a bellboy
a quarter to fetch a morning newspaper from the lobby,
and sent to Tinka a post-card: “Papa wishes
you were here to bat round with him.”
The meetings of the convention were held in the ballroom
of the Allen House. In an anteroom was the office
of the chairman of the executive committee. He
was the busiest man in the convention; he was so busy
that he got nothing done whatever. He sat at
a marquetry table, in a room littered with crumpled
paper and, all day long, town-boosters and lobbyists
and orators who wished to lead debates came and whispered
to him, whereupon he looked vague, and said rapidly,
“Yes, yes, that’s a fine idea; we’ll
do that,” and instantly forgot all about it,
lighted a cigar and forgot that too, while the telephone
rang mercilessly and about him men kept beseeching,
“Say, Mr. Chairman—say, Mr. Chairman!”
without penetrating his exhausted hearing.
