Chum Frink had recently been on a lecture-tour among the small towns, and he chuckled, “Awful good to get back to civilization! I certainly been seeing some hick towns! I mean-- Course the folks there are the best on earth, but, gee whiz, those Main Street burgs are slow, and you fellows can’t hardly appreciate what it means to be here with a bunch of live ones!” “You bet!” exulted Orville Jones. “They’re the best folks on earth, those small-town folks, but, oh, mama! what conversation! Why, say, they can’t talk about anything but the weather and the ne-oo Ford, by heckalorum!” “That’s right. They all talk about just the same things,” said Eddie Swanson. “Don’t they, though! They just say the same things over and over,” said Vergil Gunch. “Yes, it’s really remarkable. They seem to lack all power of looking at things impersonally. They simply go over and over the same talk about Fords and the weather and so on,” said Howard Littlefield. “Still, at that, you can’t blame ’em. They haven’t got any intellectual stimulus such as you get up here in the city,” said Chum Frink. “Gosh, that’s right,” said Babbitt. “I don’t want you highbrows to get stuck on yourselves but I must say it keeps a fellow right up on his toes to sit in with a poet and with Howard, the guy that put the con in economics! But these small-town boobs, with nobody but each other to talk to, no wonder they get so sloppy and uncultured in their speech, and so balled-up in their thinking!” Orville Jones commented, “And, then take our other advantages--the movies, frinstance. These Yapville sports think they’re all-get-out if they have one change of bill a week, where here in the city you got your choice of a dozen diff’rent movies any evening you want to name!” “Sure, and the inspiration we get from rubbing up against high-class hustlers every day and getting jam full of ginger,” said Eddie Swanson. “Same time,” said Babbitt, “no sense excusing these rube burgs too easy. Fellow’s own fault if he doesn’t show the initiative to up and beat it to the city, like we done--did. And, just speaking in confidence among friends, they’re jealous as the devil of a city man. Every time I go up to Catawba I have to go around apologizing to the fellows I was brought up with because I’ve more or less succeeded and they haven’t. And if you talk natural to ’em, way we do here, and show finesse and what you might call a broad point of view, why, they think you’re putting on side. There’s my own half-brother Martin--runs the little ole general store my Dad used to keep. Say, I’ll bet he don’t know there is such a thing as a Tux--as a dinner-jacket. If he was to come in here now, he’d think we were a bunch of--of-- Why, gosh, I swear, he wouldn’t know what to think! Yes, sir, they’re jealous!”