When Ted had returned to Zenith, Babbitt was lonely.  As he was trying to make alliance between Offutt and certain Milwaukee interests which wanted the race-track plot, most of his time was taken up in waiting for telephone calls....  Sitting on the edge of his bed, holding the portable telephone, asking wearily, “Mr. Sagen not in yet?  Didn’ he leave any message for me?  All right, I’ll hold the wire.”  Staring at a stain on the wall, reflecting that it resembled a shoe, and being bored by this twentieth discovery that it resembled a shoe.  Lighting a cigarette; then, bound to the telephone with no ashtray in reach, wondering what to do with this burning menace and anxiously trying to toss it into the tiled bathroom.  At last, on the telephone, “No message, eh?  All right, I’ll call up again.”

One afternoon he wandered through snow-rutted streets of which he had never heard, streets of small tenements and two-family houses and marooned cottages.  It came to him that he had nothing to do, that there was nothing he wanted to do.  He was bleakly lonely in the evening, when he dined by himself at the Regency Hotel.  He sat in the lobby afterward, in a plush chair bedecked with the Saxe-Coburg arms, lighting a cigar and looking for some one who would come and play with him and save him from thinking.  In the chair next to him (showing the arms of Lithuania) was a half-familiar man, a large red-faced man with pop eyes and a deficient yellow mustache.  He seemed kind and insignificant, and as lonely as Babbitt himself.  He wore a tweed suit and a reluctant orange tie.

It came to Babbitt with a pyrotechnic crash.  The melancholy stranger was Sir Gerald Doak.

Instinctively Babbitt rose, bumbling, “How ’re you, Sir Gerald?  ’Member we met in Zenith, at Charley McKelvey’s?  Babbitt’s my name—­real estate.”

“Oh!  How d’ you do.”  Sir Gerald shook hands flabbily.

Embarrassed, standing, wondering how he could retreat, Babbitt maundered, “Well, I suppose you been having a great trip since we saw you in Zenith.”

“Quite.  British Columbia and California and all over the place,” he said doubtfully, looking at Babbitt lifelessly.

“How did you find business conditions in British Columbia?  Or I suppose maybe you didn’t look into ’em.  Scenery and sport and so on?”

“Scenery?  Oh, capital.  But business conditions—­You know, Mr. Babbitt, they’re having almost as much unemployment as we are.”  Sir Gerald was speaking warmly now.

“So?  Business conditions not so doggone good, eh?”

“No, business conditions weren’t at all what I’d hoped to find them.”

“Not good, eh?”

“No, not—­not really good.”

“That’s a darn shame.  Well—­I suppose you’re waiting for somebody to take you out to some big shindig, Sir Gerald.”

“Shindig?  Oh.  Shindig.  No, to tell you the truth, I was wondering what the deuce I could do this evening.  Don’t know a soul in Tchicahgo.  I wonder if you happen to know whether there’s a good theater in this city?”