He sent Mat Penniman to the recorder's office to dig out the names of the owners of houses which were displaying For Rent signs of other brokers; he talked to a man who desired to lease a store-building for a pool-room; he ran
over the list of home-leases which were about to expire; he sent Thomas Bywaters, a street-car
conductor who played at
real estate in spare time, to call on side-street "prospects" who were unworthy the strategies of Stanley Graff. But he had spent his credulous excitement of creation, and these routine details annoyed him. One moment of
heroism he had, in discovering a new way of stopping
smoking.
He stopped smoking at least once a month. He went through with it like the solid citizen he was: admitted the evils of
tobacco, courageously made resolves, laid out plans to check the vice, tapered off his allowance of
cigars, and expounded the pleasures of
virtuousness to every one he met. He did everything, in fact, except stop smoking.
Two months before, by ruling out a
schedule, noting down the hour and minute of each smoke, and ecstatically increasing the intervals between smokes, he
had brought himself down to three cigars a day. Then he had lost the schedule.
A week ago he had invented a system of leaving his cigar-case and
cigarette-box in an unused drawer at the bottom of the correspondence-file, in
the outer office. "I'll just naturally be ashamed to go poking in there all day long, making a fool of myself before my own
employees!" he reasoned. By
the end of three days he was trained to leave his desk, walk to the file, take out and light a cigar, without knowing that he was doing it.
This morning it was revealed to him that it had been too easy to open the file. Lock it, that was the thing! Inspired, he rushed out and locked up his
cigars, his cigarettes, and even his box of safety
matches; and the key to the file drawer he hid in his desk. But the crusading passion of it made him so tobacco-hungry that he immediately recovered the key, walked with forbidding
dignity to the file, took out a cigar and a match--"but only one match; if ole cigar goes out, it'll by golly have to stay out!" Later, when the cigar did go
out, he took one more match from the file, and when a buyer and a seller came in for a conference at eleven-thirty, naturally he had to offer them cigars. His
conscience protested, "Why, you're smoking with them!" but he bullied it, "Oh, shut up! I'm busy now. Of course by-and-by--" There was no by-and-by, yet his belief that he had crushed the unclean habit made him feel
noble and very happy. When he called up Paul Riesling he was, in his moral splendor, unusually eager.
He was fonder of Paul Riesling than of any one on earth except himself and his daughter Tinka. They had been classmates, roommates, in the
State University,
but always he thought of Paul Riesling, with his dark slimness, his precisely parted hair, his nose-glasses, his hesitant speech, his moodiness, his love of
music, as a younger brother, to be petted and protected. Paul had gone into his father's business, after graduation; he was now a
wholesaler and small
manufacturer of prepared-paper roofing. But Babbitt strenuously believed and
lengthily announced to the world of Good Fellows that Paul could have been a great
violinist or
painter or
writer. "Why say, the letters that boy sent me
on his trip to the
Canadian Rockies, they just absolutely make you see the place as if you were standing there. Believe me, he could have given any of
these bloomin' authors a whale of a run for their money!"
Yet on the
telephone they said only:
"South 343. No, no, no! I said SOUTH--South 343. Say, operator, what the dickens is the trouble? Can't you get me South 343? Why certainly they'll
answer. Oh, Hello, 343? Wanta speak Mist' Riesling, Mist' Babbitt talking. . . 'Lo, Paul?"
"Yuh."
"'S George speaking."
"Yuh."
"How's old socks?"
"Fair to middlin'. How 're you?"
"Fine, Paulibus. Well, what do you know?"
"Oh, nothing much."
"Where you been keepin' yourself?"
"Oh, just stickin' round. What's up, Georgie?"
"How 'bout lil lunch 's noon?"
"Be all right with me, I guess. Club?'
"Yuh. Meet you there twelve-thirty."
"A' right. Twelve-thirty. S' long, Georgie."
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