The Athletic Club building is nine stories high, yellow brick with glassy roof-garden above and portico of huge limestone columns below. The lobby, with its thick pillars of porous Caen stone, its pointed vaulting, and a brown glazed-tile floor like well-baked bread-crust, is a combination of cathedral-crypt and rathskellar. The members rush into the lobby as though they were shopping and hadn’t much time for it. Thus did Babbitt enter, and to the group standing by the cigar-counter he whooped, “How’s the boys? How’s the boys? Well, well, fine day!” Jovially they whooped back--Vergil Gunch, the coal-dealer, Sidney Finkelstein, the ladies’-ready-to-wear buyer for Parcher & Stein’s department-store, and Professor Joseph K. Pumphrey, owner of the Riteway Business College and instructor in Public Speaking, Business English, Scenario Writing, and Commercial Law. Though Babbitt admired this savant, and appreciated Sidney Finkelstein as “a mighty smart buyer and a good liberal spender,” it was to Vergil Gunch that he turned with enthusiasm. Mr. Gunch was president of the Boosters’ Club, a weekly lunch-club, local chapter of a national organization which promoted sound business and friendliness among Regular Fellows. He was also no less an official than Esteemed Leading Knight in the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, and it was rumored that at the next election he would be a candidate for Exalted Ruler. He was a jolly man, given to oratory and to chumminess with the arts. He called on the famous actors and vaudeville artists when they came to town, gave them cigars, addressed them by their first names, and--sometimes--succeeded in bringing them to the Boosters’ lunches to give The Boys a Free Entertainment. He was a large man with hair _en brosse_, and he knew the latest jokes, but he played poker close to the chest. It was at his party that Babbitt had sucked in the virus of to-day’s restlessness. Gunch shouted, “How’s the old Bolsheviki? How do you feel, the morning after the night before?” “Oh, boy! Some head! That was a regular party you threw, Verg! Hope you haven’t forgotten I took that last cute little jack-pot!” Babbitt bellowed. (He was three feet from Gunch.) “That’s all right now! What I’ll hand you next time, Georgie! Say, juh notice in the paper the way the New York Assembly stood up to the Reds?” “You bet I did. That was fine, eh? Nice day to-day.” “Yes, it’s one mighty fine spring day, but nights still cold.” “Yeh, you’re right they are! Had to have coupla blankets last night, out on the sleeping-porch. Say, Sid,” Babbitt turned to Finkelstein, the buyer, “got something wanta ask you about. I went out and bought me an electric cigar-lighter for the car, this noon, and--” “Good hunch!” said Finkelstein, while even the learned Professor Pumphrey, a bulbous man with a pepper-and-salt cutaway and a pipe-organ voice, commented, “That makes a dandy accessory. Cigar-lighter gives tone to the dashboard.”