“George, what’s this I hear about some song and dance you gave Colonel Snow about not wanting to join the G.C.L.? What the dickens you trying to do? Wreck the firm? You don’t suppose these Big Guns will stand your bucking them and springing all this ‘liberal’ poppycock you been getting off lately, do you?” “Oh, rats, Henry T., you been reading bum fiction. There ain’t any such a thing as these plots to keep folks from being liberal. This is a free country. A man can do anything he wants to.” “Course th’ ain’t any plots. Who said they was? Only if folks get an idea you’re scatter-brained and unstable, you don’t suppose they’ll want to do business with you, do you? One little rumor about your being a crank would do more to ruin this business than all the plots and stuff that these fool story-writers could think up in a month of Sundays.” That afternoon, when the old reliable Conrad Lyte, the merry miser, Conrad Lyte, appeared, and Babbitt suggested his buying a parcel of land in the new residential section of Dorchester, Lyte said hastily, too hastily, “No, no, don’t want to go into anything new just now.” A week later Babbitt learned, through Henry Thompson, that the officials of the Street Traction Company were planning another real-estate coup, and that Sanders, Torrey and Wing, not the Babbitt-Thompson Company, were to handle it for them. “I figure that Jake Offutt is kind of leery about the way folks are talking about you. Of course Jake is a rock-ribbed old die-hard, and he probably advised the Traction fellows to get some other broker. George, you got to do something!” trembled Thompson. And, in a rush, Babbitt agreed. All nonsense the way people misjudged him, but still-- He determined to join the Good Citizens’ League the next time he was asked, and in furious resignation he waited. He wasn’t asked. They ignored him. He did not have the courage to go to the League and beg in, and he took refuge in a shaky boast that he had “gotten away with bucking the whole city. Nobody could dictate to _him_ how he was going to think and act!”