The entrance lobby of the Athletic Club was Gothic, the washroom Roman Imperial, the lounge Spanish Mission, and the reading-room in Chinese Chippendale, but the gem of the club was the dining-room, the masterpiece of Ferdinand Reitman, Zenith’s busiest architect.  It was lofty and half-timbered, with Tudor leaded casements, an oriel, a somewhat musicianless musicians’-gallery, and tapestries believed to illustrate the granting of Magna Charta.  The open beams had been hand-adzed at Jake Offutt’s car-body works, the hinge; were of hand-wrought iron, the wainscot studded with handmade wooden pegs, and at one end of the room was a heraldic and hooded stone fireplace which the club’s advertising-pamphlet asserted to be not only larger than any of the fireplaces in European castles but of a draught incomparably more scientific.  It was also much cleaner, as no fire had ever been built in it.

Half of the tables were mammoth slabs which seated twenty or thirty men.  Babbitt usually sat at the one near the door, with a group including Gunch, Finkelstein, Professor Pumphrey, Howard Littlefield, his neighbor, T. Cholmondeley Frink, the poet and advertising-agent, and Orville Jones, whose laundry was in many ways the best in Zenith.  They composed a club within the club, and merrily called themselves “The Roughnecks.”  To-day as he passed their table the Roughnecks greeted him, “Come on, sit in!  You ‘n’ Paul too proud to feed with poor folks?  Afraid somebody might stick you for a bottle of Bevo, George?  Strikes me you swells are getting awful darn exclusive!”

He thundered, “You bet!  We can’t afford to have our reps ruined by being seen with you tightwads!” and guided Paul to one of the small tables beneath the musicians’-gallery.  He felt guilty.  At the Zenith Athletic Club, privacy was very bad form.  But he wanted Paul to himself.

That morning he had advocated lighter lunches and now he ordered nothing but English mutton chop, radishes, peas, deep-dish apple pie, a bit of cheese, and a pot of coffee with cream, adding, as he did invariably, “And uh—­Oh, and you might give me an order of French fried potatoes.”  When the chop came he vigorously peppered it and salted it.  He always peppered and salted his meat, and vigorously, before tasting it.

Paul and he took up the spring-like quality of the spring, the virtues of the electric cigar-lighter, and the action of the New York State Assembly.  It was not till Babbitt was thick and disconsolate with mutton grease that he flung out: 

“I wound up a nice little deal with Conrad Lyte this morning that put five hundred good round plunks in my pocket.  Pretty nice—­pretty nice!  And yet—­I don’t know what’s the matter with me to-day.  Maybe it’s an attack of spring fever, or staying up too late at Verg Gunch’s, or maybe it’s just the winter’s work piling up, but I’ve felt kind of down in the mouth all day long.  Course I wouldn’t beef about it to the fellows at the Roughnecks’