The guests drove off; the garden shivered into quiet.
But Mrs. Crosby Knowlton sighed as she looked at a
marble seat warm from five hundred summers of Amalfi.
On the face of a winged sphinx which supported it
some one had drawn a mustache in lead-pencil.
Crumpled paper napkins were dumped among the Michaelmas
daisies. On the walk, like shredded lovely flesh,
were the petals of the last gallant rose. Cigarette
stubs floated in the goldfish pool, trailing an evil
stain as they swelled and disintegrated, and beneath
the marble seat, the fragments carefully put together,
was a smashed teacup.
VI
As he rode back to the hotel Babbitt reflected, “Myra
would have enjoyed all this social agony.”
For himself he cared less for the garden party than
for the motor tours which the Monarch Chamber of Commerce
had arranged. Indefatigably he viewed water-reservoirs,
suburban trolley-stations, and tanneries. He
devoured the statistics which were given to him, and
marveled to his roommate, W. A. Rogers, “Of course
this town isn’t a patch on Zenith; it hasn’t
got our outlook and natural resources; but did you
know—I nev’ did till to-day—that
they manufactured seven hundred and sixty-three million
feet of lumber last year? What d’ you think
of that!”
He was nervous as the time for reading his paper approached.
When he stood on the low platform before the convention,
he trembled and saw only a purple haze. But he
was in earnest, and when he had finished the formal
paper he talked to them, his hands in his pockets,
his spectacled face a flashing disk, like a plate
set up on edge in the lamplight. They shouted
“That’s the stuff!” and in the discussion
afterward they referred with impressiveness to “our
friend and brother, Mr. George F. Babbitt.”
He had in fifteen minutes changed from a minor delegate
to a personage almost as well known as that diplomat
of business, Cecil Rountree. After the meeting,
delegates from all over the state said, “Hower
you, Brother Babbitt?” Sixteen complete strangers
called him “George,” and three men took
him into corners to confide, “Mighty glad you
had the courage to stand up and give the Profession
a real boost. Now I’ve always maintained—”
Next morning, with tremendous casualness, Babbitt
asked the girl at the hotel news-stand for the newspapers
from Zenith. There was nothing in the Press,
but in the Advocate-Times, on the third page—He
gasped. They had printed his picture and a half-column
account. The heading was “Sensation at
Annual Land-men’s Convention. G. F. Babbitt,
Prominent Ziptown Realtor, Keynoter in Fine Address.”
He murmured reverently, “I guess some of the
folks on Floral Heights will sit up and take notice
now, and pay a little attention to old Georgie!”
VII
It was the last meeting. The delegations were
presenting the claims of their several cities to the
next year’s convention. Orators were announcing
that “Galop de Vache, the Capital City, the site
of Kremer College and of the Upholtz Knitting Works,
is the recognized center of culture and high-class
enterprise;” and that “Hamburg, the Big
Little City with the Logical Location, where every
man is open-handed and every woman a heaven-born hostess,
throws wide to you her hospitable gates.”
