in Zenith, and the embodiment of nearly all its vices and its virtues.
Babbitt is a more important character than Dr. Kennicott in that he is more nearly ubiquitous. Less trustworthy as a man, he will perhaps be found more interesting as a "hero," because he has less of character and more of temperament. Unlike the Doctor, he is highly self-conscious, he has a "soft" streak, he is an egotist, and he is eager for the applause and admiration of men and women, not excluding his wife, for whom he feels an habitual tolerance, and including his stenographer, whom he wishes to impress as a "great man," and his manicurist, to whom he is willing, in relaxed and erratic moods, to appear as a person with possibilities of romance. In the morning Mr. Babbitt wears a well-made, well-pressed gray suit with white piping on the V of the vest. In the evening he wears, when there is important company, a "Tuxedo" which Mrs. Babbitt vainly insists that he should call a "dinner-jacket"—that is the precise "note" of their social status. He is diligent in business and not more crooked than William Washington Eathorne, President of the First State Bank, a chilly old gentleman who lives in an old brick house of the Civil War period, and who impresses Babbitt as "the real thing" by quietly ringing for a whiskey toddy, instead of mooing and baying around the subject, as in his own circle is the custom when the host produces something illicit from the ice-box.
