One evening on his way home Babbitt dropped in at the Broadway bar that he liked best.  Always there were three or four fellows there from the downtown offices whom he knew.  And then there would be high-balls and stories, and he would hurry home to dinner a little late but feeling good, and a little sorry for the poor Standard Oil Company.  On this evening as he entered he heard some one say:  “Babbitt was in last night as full as a boiled owl.”

Babbitt walked to the bar, and saw in the mirror that his face was as white as chalk.  For the first time he had looked Truth in the eyes.  Others had lied to him; he had dissembled with himself.  He was a drunkard, and had not known it.  What he had fondly imagined was a pleasant exhilaration had been maudlin intoxication.  His fancied wit had been drivel; his gay humors nothing but the noisy vagaries of a sot.  But, never again!

“A glass of seltzer,” he said to the bartender.

A little silence fell upon the group of his cronies, who had been expecting him to join them.

“Going off the stuff, Bob?” one of them asked politely and with more formality than the highballs ever called forth.

“Yes,” said Babbitt.

Some one of the group took up the unwashed thread of a story he had been telling; the bartender shoved over a dime and a nickel change from the quarter, ungarnished with his customary smile; and Babbitt walked out.

Now, Babbitt had a home and a wife—­but that is another story.  And I will tell you that story, which will show you a better habit and a worse story than you could find in the man who invented the phrase.

It began away up in Sullivan County, where so many rivers and so much trouble begins—­or begin; how would you say that?  It was July, and Jessie was a summer boarder at the Mountain Squint Hotel, and Bob, who was just out of college, saw her one day—­and they were married in September.  That’s the tabloid novel—­one swallow of water, and it’s gone.

But those July days!

Let the exclamation point expound it, for I shall not.  For particulars you might read up on “Romeo and Juliet,” and Abraham Lincoln’s thrilling sonnet about “You can fool some of the people,” &c., and Darwin’s works.

But one thing I must tell you about.  Both of them were mad over Omar’s Rubaiyat.  They knew every verse of the old bluffer by heart—­not consecutively, but picking ’em out here and there as you fork the mushrooms in a fifty-cent steak a la Bordelaise.  Sullivan County is full of rocks and trees; and Jessie used to sit on them, and—­please be good—­used to sit on the rocks; and Bob had a way of standing behind her with his hands over her shoulders holding her hands, and his face close to hers, and they would repeat over and over their favorite verses of the old tent-maker.  They saw only the poetry and philosophy of the lines then—­indeed, they agreed that the Wine was only an image, and that what was meant to be celebrated was some divinity, or maybe Love or Life.  However, at that time neither of them had tasted the stuff that goes with a sixty-cent table d’hote.