“Oh, boy!  Some head!  That was a regular party you threw, Verg!  Hope you haven’t forgotten I took that last cute little jack-pot!” Babbitt bellowed. (He was three feet from Gunch.)

“That’s all right now!  What I’ll hand you next time, Georgie!  Say, juh notice in the paper the way the New York Assembly stood up to the Reds?”

“You bet I did.  That was fine, eh?  Nice day to-day.”

“Yes, it’s one mighty fine spring day, but nights still cold.”

“Yeh, you’re right they are!  Had to have coupla blankets last night, out on the sleeping-porch.  Say, Sid,” Babbitt turned to Finkelstein, the buyer, “got something wanta ask you about.  I went out and bought me an electric cigar-lighter for the car, this noon, and—­”

“Good hunch!” said Finkelstein, while even the learned Professor Pumphrey, a bulbous man with a pepper-and-salt cutaway and a pipe-organ voice, commented, “That makes a dandy accessory.  Cigar-lighter gives tone to the dashboard.”

“Yep, finally decided I’d buy me one.  Got the best on the market, the clerk said it was.  Paid five bucks for it.  Just wondering if I got stuck.  What do they charge for ’em at the store, Sid?”

Finkelstein asserted that five dollars was not too great a sum, not for a really high-class lighter which was suitably nickeled and provided with connections of the very best quality.  “I always say—­and believe me, I base it on a pretty fairly extensive mercantile experience—­the best is the cheapest in the long run.  Of course if a fellow wants to be a Jew about it, he can get cheap junk, but in the long run, the cheapest thing is—­the best you can get!  Now you take here just th’ other day:  I got a new top for my old boat and some upholstery, and I paid out a hundred and twenty-six fifty, and of course a lot of fellows would say that was too much—­Lord, if the Old Folks—­they live in one of these hick towns up-state and they simply can’t get onto the way a city fellow’s mind works, and then, of course, they’re Jews, and they’d lie right down and die if they knew Sid had anted up a hundred and twenty-six bones.  But I don’t figure I was stuck, George, not a bit.  Machine looks brand new now—­not that it’s so darned old, of course; had it less ’n three years, but I give it hard service; never drive less ’n a hundred miles on Sunday and, uh—­Oh, I don’t really think you got stuck, George.  In the long run, the best is, you might say, it’s unquestionably the cheapest.”

“That’s right,” said Vergil Gunch.  “That’s the way I look at it.  If a fellow is keyed up to what you might call intensive living, the way you get it here in Zenith—­all the hustle and mental activity that’s going on with a bunch of live-wires like the Boosters and here in the Z.A.C., why, he’s got to save his nerves by having the best.”

Babbitt nodded his head at every fifth word in the roaring rhythm; and by the conclusion, in Gunch’s renowned humorous vein, he was enchanted: