at the Athletic but at the Union Club.  Babbitt explained with frequency, “You couldn’t hire me to join the Tonawanda, even if I did have a hundred and eighty bucks to throw away on the initiation fee.  At the Outing we’ve got a bunch of real human fellows, and the finest lot of little women in town—­just as good at joshing as the men—­but at the Tonawanda there’s nothing but these would-be’s in New York get-ups, drinking tea!  Too much dog altogether.  Why, I wouldn’t join the Tonawanda even if they—­I wouldn’t join it on a bet!”

When he had played four or five holes, he relaxed a bit, his tobacco-fluttering heart beat more normally, and his voice slowed to the drawling of his hundred generations of peasant ancestors.

IV

At least once a week Mr. and Mrs. Babbitt and Tinka went to the movies.  Their favorite motion-picture theater was the Chateau, which held three thousand spectators and had an orchestra of fifty pieces which played Arrangements from the Operas and suites portraying a Day on the Farm, or a Four-alarm Fire.  In the stone rotunda, decorated with crown-embroidered velvet chairs and almost medieval tapestries, parrakeets sat on gilded lotos columns.

With exclamations of “Well, by golly!” and “You got to go some to beat this dump!” Babbitt admired the Chateau.  As he stared across the thousands of heads, a gray plain in the dimness, as he smelled good clothes and mild perfume and chewing-gum, he felt as when he had first seen a mountain and realized how very, very much earth and rock there was in it.

He liked three kinds of films:  pretty bathing girls with bare legs; policemen or cowboys and an industrious shooting of revolvers; and funny fat men who ate spaghetti.  He chuckled with immense, moist-eyed sentimentality at interludes portraying puppies, kittens, and chubby babies; and he wept at deathbeds and old mothers being patient in mortgaged cottages.  Mrs. Babbitt preferred the pictures in which handsome young women in elaborate frocks moved through sets ticketed as the drawing-rooms of New York millionaires.  As for Tinka, she preferred, or was believed to prefer, whatever her parents told her to.

All his relaxations—­baseball, golf, movies, bridge, motoring, long talks with Paul at the Athletic Club, or at the Good Red Beef and Old English Chop House—­were necessary to Babbitt, for he was entering a year of such activity as he had never known.

CHAPTER XIII

I

It was by accident that Babbitt had his opportunity to address the S. A. R. E. B.

The S. A. R. E. B., as its members called it, with the universal passion for mysterious and important-sounding initials, was the State Association of Real Estate Boards; the organization of brokers and operators.  It was to hold its annual convention at Monarch, Zenith’s chief rival among the cities of the state.  Babbitt was an official delegate; another was Cecil Rountree, whom Babbitt admired for his picaresque speculative building, and hated for his social position, for being present at the smartest dances on Royal Ridge.  Rountree was chairman of the convention program-committee.