He had received the rank of colonel on the general staff of the school.  He was plumply pleased by salutes on the street from unknown small boys; his ears were tickled to ruddy ecstasy by hearing himself called “Colonel;” and if he did not attend Sunday School merely to be thus exalted, certainly he thought about it all the way there.

He was particularly pleasant to the press-agent, Kenneth Escott; he took him to lunch at the Athletic Club and had him at the house for dinner.

Like many of the cocksure young men who forage about cities in apparent contentment and who express their cynicism in supercilious slang, Escott was shy and lonely.  His shrewd starveling face broadened with joy at dinner, and he blurted, “Gee whillikins, Mrs. Babbitt, if you knew how good it is to have home eats again!”

Escott and Verona liked each other.  All evening they “talked about ideas.”  They discovered that they were Radicals.  True, they were sensible about it.  They agreed that all communists were criminals; that this vers libre was tommy-rot; and that while there ought to be universal disarmament, of course Great Britain and the United States must, on behalf of oppressed small nations, keep a navy equal to the tonnage of all the rest of the world.  But they were so revolutionary that they predicted (to Babbitt’s irritation) that there would some day be a Third Party which would give trouble to the Republicans and Democrats.

Escott shook hands with Babbitt three times, at parting.

Babbitt mentioned his extreme fondness for Eathorne.

Within a week three newspapers presented accounts of Babbitt’s sterling labors for religion, and all of them tactfully mentioned William Washington Eathorne as his collaborator.

Nothing had brought Babbitt quite so much credit at the Elks, the Athletic Club, and the Boosters’.  His friends had always congratulated him on his oratory, but in their praise was doubt, for even in speeches advertising the city there was something highbrow and degenerate, like writing poetry.  But now Orville Jones shouted across the Athletic dining-room, “Here’s the new director of the First State Bank!” Grover Butterbaugh, the eminent wholesaler of plumbers’ supplies, chuckled, “Wonder you mix with common folks, after holding Eathorne’s hand!” And Emil Wengert, the jeweler, was at last willing to discuss buying a house in Dorchester.

IV

When the Sunday School campaign was finished, Babbitt suggested to Kenneth Escott, “Say, how about doing a little boosting for Doc Drew personally?”

Escott grinned.  “You trust the doc to do a little boosting for himself, Mr. Babbitt!  There’s hardly a week goes by without his ringing up the paper to say if we’ll chase a reporter up to his Study, he’ll let us in on the story about the swell sermon he’s going to preach on the wickedness of short skirts, or the authorship of the Pentateuch.  Don’t you worry about him.  There’s just one better publicity-grabber in town, and that’s this Dora Gibson Tucker that runs the Child Welfare and the Americanization League, and the only reason she’s got Drew beaten is because she has got some brains!”