As I say, I recently spent a summer in Zenith; but any observations that I make are not based solely on that single visit. My parents moved to Zenith when I was six years old--which, alas, was long enough ago to make them Old Residents by now; I lived there as a child, as a boy, and during my summer vacations from college; and I have returned to Zenith for six months or so every two or three years since. I have seen the city grow and have noted the changes more sharply for the intervening years of absence. And I assert that Zenith is not at all in spirit the kind of place that Mr. Lewis implies. Of course I did not know, not really know, even one individual among the toiling throngs in the factories, at the steel plant, in the cement works. How should I? And I did not know the Babbitt group, save, superficially, a member here and there. But I observed them on the streets and heard them talk in hotel lobbies, and I admired the accuracy of Mr. Lewis’s eye and ear. The people I played with were the people who take their diversion at the Country Club or give dinners at the Zenith Club in the city proper. I saw them, too, at work in their offices: lawyers, doctors, railwaymen, brokers, architects, contractors, merchants; young men of twenty-five to forty; middle-aged men of forty to sixty-five; and their wives and daughters. A not unfair cross-section of Zenith life, once the hopeless separation from the vastly larger mass of manual labour beneath is admitted, and I think they were more numerous than the Babbitts. Of course I do not profess to have known them all; but I am not concerned with their numbers. The point is that they _were_ Zenith. They gave the city its tone; you felt them in looking at the blocks and blocks of handsome houses; they made the Babbitts appear not so much shoddy as unrepresentative, insignificant; their composite soul was the soul of Zenith. What, then, were these people like? In any profound sense that is a difficult question to answer. There was a deep similarity among them; something important that they all had in common, but something that was very hard to get at. It is, however, easy to say what they were not like. They were not like the Babbitts; they were not at all like the McKelveys or Horace Updike, the people whom George Babbitt longed to know; they were not like the characters in Mr. Hergesheimer’s _Cytherea_, nor like those in Margaret Banning’s _Country Club People_. They were less sophisticated, if to be sophisticated means to have a weary air and to say cynical things cleverly; they were more so, if it means to be reasonably well educated, to stand unconsciously for some reality (no matter what), and to have ease of manner.