It was big—­and Babbitt respected bigness in anything; in mountains, jewels, muscles, wealth, or words.  He was, for a spring-enchanted moment, the lyric and almost unselfish lover of Zenith.  He thought of the outlying factory suburbs; of the Chaloosa River with its strangely eroded banks; of the orchard-dappled Tonawanda Hills to the North, and all the fat dairy land and big barns and comfortable herds.  As he dropped his passenger he cried, “Gosh, I feel pretty good this morning!” III

Epochal as starting the car was the drama of parking it before he entered his office.  As he turned from Oberlin Avenue round the corner into Third Street, N.E., he peered ahead for a space in the line of parked cars.  He angrily just missed a space as a rival driver slid into it.  Ahead, another car was leaving the curb, and Babbitt slowed up, holding out his hand to the cars pressing on him from behind, agitatedly motioning an old woman to go ahead, avoiding a truck which bore down on him from one side.  With front wheels nicking the wrought-steel bumper of the car in front, he stopped, feverishly cramped his steering-wheel, slid back into the vacant space and, with eighteen inches of room, manoeuvered to bring the car level with the curb.  It was a virile adventure masterfully executed.  With satisfaction he locked a thief-proof steel wedge on the front wheel, and crossed the street to his real-estate office on the ground floor of the Reeves Building.

The Reeves Building was as fireproof as a rock and as efficient as a typewriter; fourteen stories of yellow pressed brick, with clean, upright, unornamented lines.  It was filled with the offices of lawyers, doctors, agents for machinery, for emery wheels, for wire fencing, for mining-stock.  Their gold signs shone on the windows.  The entrance was too modern to be flamboyant with pillars; it was quiet, shrewd, neat.  Along the Third Street side were a Western Union Telegraph Office, the Blue Delft Candy Shop, Shotwell’s Stationery Shop, and the Babbitt-Thompson Realty Company.

Babbitt could have entered his office from the street, as customers did, but it made him feel an insider to go through the corridor of the building and enter by the back door.  Thus he was greeted by the villagers.

The little unknown people who inhabited the Reeves Building corridors—­elevator-runners, starter, engineers, superintendent, and the doubtful-looking lame man who conducted the news and cigar stand—­were in no way city-dwellers.  They were rustics, living in a constricted valley, interested only in one another and in The Building.  Their Main Street was the entrance hall, with its stone floor, severe marble ceiling, and the inner windows of the shops.  The liveliest place on the street was the Reeves Building Barber Shop, but this was also Babbitt’s one embarrassment.  Himself, he patronized the glittering Pompeian Barber Shop in the Hotel Thornleigh, and every time he passed the Reeves shop—­ten times a day, a hundred times—­he felt untrue to his own village.