For once, Babbitt understood him.

III

Their launch rounded the bend; at the head of the lake, under a mountain slope, they saw the little central dining-shack of their hotel and the crescent of squat log cottages which served as bedrooms.  They landed, and endured the critical examination of the habitues who had been at the hotel for a whole week.  In their cottage, with its high stone fireplace, they hastened, as Babbitt expressed it, to “get into some regular he-togs.”  They came out; Paul in an old gray suit and soft white shirt; Babbitt in khaki shirt and vast and flapping khaki trousers.  It was excessively new khaki; his rimless spectacles belonged to a city office; and his face was not tanned but a city pink.  He made a discordant noise in the place.  But with infinite satisfaction he slapped his legs and crowed, “Say, this is getting back home, eh?”

They stood on the wharf before the hotel.  He winked at Paul and drew from his back pocket a plug of chewing-tobacco, a vulgarism forbidden in the Babbitt home.  He took a chew, beaming and wagging his head as he tugged at it.  “Um!  Um!  Maybe I haven’t been hungry for a wad of eating-tobacco!  Have some?”

They looked at each other in a grin of understanding.  Paul took the plug, gnawed at it.  They stood quiet, their jaws working.  They solemnly spat, one after the other, into the placid water.  They stretched voluptuously, with lifted arms and arched backs.  From beyond the mountains came the shuffling sound of a far-off train.  A trout leaped, and fell back in a silver circle.  They sighed together.

IV

They had a week before their families came.  Each evening they planned to get up early and fish before breakfast.  Each morning they lay abed till the breakfast-bell, pleasantly conscious that there were no efficient wives to rouse them.  The mornings were cold; the fire was kindly as they dressed.

Paul was distressingly clean, but Babbitt reveled in a good sound dirtiness, in not having to shave till his spirit was moved to it.  He treasured every grease spot and fish-scale on his new khaki trousers.

All morning they fished unenergetically, or tramped the dim and aqueous-lighted trails among rank ferns and moss sprinkled with crimson bells.  They slept all afternoon, and till midnight played stud-poker with the guides.  Poker was a serious business to the guides.  They did not gossip; they shuffled the thick greasy cards with a deft ferocity menacing to the “sports;” and Joe Paradise, king of guides, was sarcastic to loiterers who halted the game even to scratch.

At midnight, as Paul and he blundered to their cottage over the pungent wet grass, and pine-roots confusing in the darkness, Babbitt rejoiced that he did not have to explain to his wife where he had been all evening.