1922 Babbitt Sinclair Lewis HC Book

Description: Excellent condition or better. SINCLAIR LEWIS BABBITT P. F. COLLIER & SON CORPORATION NEW YORK ----------- 2 ----------- COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY BARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC. MA PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ----------- 4 ----------- 2 BABBITT Cues of men with lunch-boxes clumped toward the immensity, of new factories, sheets of glass and hollow tile, glittering shops I where five thousand men worked beneath one roof, pouring and across the veldt. The whistles rolled out in greeting a out the honest wares that would be sold up the Euphrates chorus cheerful as the April dawn; the song of labor in a city built-it seemed-for giants. II There was nothing of the giant in the aspect of the man who was beginning to awaken on the sleeping-porch of a Dutch Colonial house in that residential district of Zenith known as Floral Heights. old now, in April, 1920, and he made nothing in particular, His name was George F. Babbitt. He was forty-six years neither butter nor shoes nor poetry, but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay. His large head was pink, his brown hair thin and dry. His face was babyish in slumber, despite his wrinkles and the red spectacle-dents on the slopes of his nose. He was not fat but he was exceedingly well fed; his cheeks were pads, and the unroughened hand which lay helpless upon the khaki- colored blanket was slightly puffy. He seemed prosperous, extremely married and unromantic; and altogether unroman- tic appeared this sleeping-porch, which looked on one sizable elm, two respectable grass-plots, a cement driveway, and a corrugated iron garage. Yet Babbitt was again dreaming of the fairy child, a dream more romantic than scarlet pagodas by a silver sea. For years the fairy child had come to him. Where others saw but Georgie Babbitt, she discerned gallant youth. waited for him, in the darkness beyond mysterious groves. She When at last he could slip away from the crowded house he ----------- 3 ----------- BABBITT CHAPTER I I THE towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; aus- tere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. They were neither citadels nor churches, but frankly and beautifully office-buildings. The mist took pity on the fretted structures of earlier gen- erations: the Post Office with its shingle-tortured mansard, the red brick minarets of hulking old houses, factories with stingy and sooted windows, wooden tenements colored like mud. The city was full of such grotesqueries, but the clean towers were thrusting them from the business center, and on the farther hills were shining new houses, homes-they seemed -for laughter and tranquillity. Over a concrete bridge fled a limousine of long sleek hood and noiseless engine. These people in evening clothes were returning from an all-night rehearsal of a Little Theater play, an artistic adventure considerably illuminated by champagne. Below the bridge curved a railroad, a maze of green and crimson lights. The New York Flyer boomed past, and twenty lines of polished steel leaped into the glare. In one of the skyscrapers the wires of the Associated Press were closing down. The telegraph operators wearily raised their celluloid eye-shades after a night of talking with Paris and Peking. Through the building crawled the scrubwomen, The dawn mist spun away. yawning, their old shoes slapping. I

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