From the back room he brought an immensely old young man, a quiet sharp-eyed man, in tan silk shirt, checked vest hanging open, and burning brown trousers—­Mr. Healey Hanson.  Mr. Hanson said only “Yuh?” but his implacable and contemptuous eyes queried Babbitt’s soul, and he seemed not at all impressed by the new dark-gray suit for which (as he had admitted to every acquaintance at the Athletic Club) Babbitt had paid a hundred and twenty-five dollars.

“Glad meet you, Mr. Hanson.  Say, uh—­I’m George Babbitt of the Babbitt-Thompson Realty Company.  I’m a great friend of Jake Offutt’s.”

“Well, what of it?”

“Say, uh, I’m going to have a party, and Jake told me you’d be able to fix me up with a little gin.”  In alarm, in obsequiousness, as Hanson’s eyes grew more bored, “You telephone to Jake about me, if you want to.”

Hanson answered by jerking his head to indicate the entrance to the back room, and strolled away.  Babbitt melodramatically crept into an apartment containing four round tables, eleven chairs, a brewery calendar, and a smell.  He waited.  Thrice he saw Healey Hanson saunter through, humming, hands in pockets, ignoring him.

By this time Babbitt had modified his valiant morning vow, “I won’t pay one cent over seven dollars a quart” to “I might pay ten.”  On Hanson’s next weary entrance he besought “Could you fix that up?” Hanson scowled, and grated, “Just a minute—­Pete’s sake—­just a min-ute!” In growing meekness Babbitt went on waiting till Hanson casually reappeared with a quart of gin—­what is euphemistically known as a quart—­in his disdainful long white hands.

“Twelve bucks,” he snapped.

“Say, uh, but say, cap’n, Jake thought you’d be able to fix me up for eight or nine a bottle.”

“Nup.  Twelve.  This is the real stuff, smuggled from Canada.  This is none o’ your neutral spirits with a drop of juniper extract,” the honest merchant said virtuously.  “Twelve bones—­if you want it.  Course y’ understand I’m just doing this anyway as a friend of Jake’s.”

“Sure!  Sure!  I understand!” Babbitt gratefully held out twelve dollars.  He felt honored by contact with greatness as Hanson yawned, stuffed the bills, uncounted, into his radiant vest, and swaggered away.

He had a number of titillations out of concealing the gin-bottle under his coat and out of hiding it in his desk.  All afternoon he snorted and chuckled and gurgled over his ability to “give the Boys a real shot in the arm to-night.”  He was, in fact, so exhilarated that he was within a block of his house before he remembered that there was a certain matter, mentioned by his wife, of fetching ice cream from Vecchia’s.  He explained, “Well, darn it—­” and drove back.

Vecchia was not a caterer, he was The Caterer of Zenith.  Most coming-out parties were held in the white and gold ballroom of the Maison Vecchia; at all nice teas the guests recognized the five kinds of Vecchia sandwiches and the seven kinds of Vecchia cakes; and all really smart dinners ended, as on a resolving chord, in Vecchia Neapolitan ice cream in one of the three reliable molds—­the melon mold, the round mold like a layer cake, and the long brick.