The Zenith Athletic Club is not athletic and it isn’t exactly a club, but it is Zenith in perfection.  It has an active and smoke-misted billiard room, it is represented by baseball and football teams, and in the pool and the gymnasium a tenth of the members sporadically try to reduce.  But most of its three thousand members use it as a cafe in which to lunch, play cards, tell stories, meet customers, and entertain out-of town uncles at dinner.  It is the largest club in the city, and its chief hatred is the conservative Union Club, which all sound members of the Athletic call “a rotten, snobbish, dull, expensive old hole—­not one Good Mixer in the place—­you couldn’t hire me to join.”  Statistics show that no member of the Athletic has ever refused election to the Union, and of those who are elected, sixty-seven per cent. resign from the Athletic and are thereafter heard to say, in the drowsy sanctity of the Union lounge, “The Athletic would be a pretty good hotel, if it were more exclusive.”

The Athletic Club building is nine stories high, yellow brick with glassy roof-garden above and portico of huge limestone columns below.  The lobby, with its thick pillars of porous Caen stone, its pointed vaulting, and a brown glazed-tile floor like well-baked bread-crust, is a combination of cathedral-crypt and rathskellar.  The members rush into the lobby as though they were shopping and hadn’t much time for it.  Thus did Babbitt enter, and to the group standing by the cigar-counter he whooped, “How’s the boys?  How’s the boys?  Well, well, fine day!”

Jovially they whooped back—­Vergil Gunch, the coal-dealer, Sidney Finkelstein, the ladies’-ready-to-wear buyer for Parcher & Stein’s department-store, and Professor Joseph K. Pumphrey, owner of the Riteway Business College and instructor in Public Speaking, Business English, Scenario Writing, and Commercial Law.  Though Babbitt admired this savant, and appreciated Sidney Finkelstein as “a mighty smart buyer and a good liberal spender,” it was to Vergil Gunch that he turned with enthusiasm.  Mr. Gunch was president of the Boosters’ Club, a weekly lunch-club, local chapter of a national organization which promoted sound business and friendliness among Regular Fellows.  He was also no less an official than Esteemed Leading Knight in the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, and it was rumored that at the next election he would be a candidate for Exalted Ruler.  He was a jolly man, given to oratory and to chumminess with the arts.  He called on the famous actors and vaudeville artists when they came to town, gave them cigars, addressed them by their first names, and—­sometimes—­succeeded in bringing them to the Boosters’ lunches to give The Boys a Free Entertainment.  He was a large man with hair en brosse, and he knew the latest jokes, but he played poker close to the chest.  It was at his party that Babbitt had sucked in the virus of to-day’s restlessness.

Gunch shouted, “How’s the old Bolsheviki?  How do you feel, the morning after the night before?”