The scene is laid in a New York boarding house and the book recalls Dickens’ descriptions of the life of the bourgeois. Lewis displays the same humor, the same pathos and a similar deftness in drawing characters. Wrenn is an elder brother of George Babbitt. He is good-humored, a trifle sentimental and shows an almost morbid craving for friendship. Like Babbitt he was born gregarious. He is shy and almost obsequious with women. He longs to be loved and to tell some one that he loves her, but he does not know how to conduct a flirtation. We can very well imagine him playing a minor rôle in Flaubert’s “Bouvard and Pecuchet,” that epic of commonplace romanticism. The scene where Our Mr. Wrenn bids farewell to the setting sun reveals an unmistakable touch of Flaubert’s sympathetic irony. Wrenn is too ignorant and too modest to vent his feelings by trying to imitate the effusions of the great romantic writers at twilight. And yet he can hardly control himself on a fall evening as he sees the sun setting beyond the Manhattan skyscrapers. He rarely looks at the sky, and prefers not to, because, when he sees it, he takes it for an impossible road to Mandalay, and it makes him blue. This particular evening, the sunset has made Wrenn sad. To comfort himself he goes to a delicatessen store, and learns a new recipe for cooking eggs. Never mind the setting sun, after all! Wrenn is going to spend the evening with his friend Nellie, whom he adores in silence and to whom he reads the newspapers! As he thinks of it, he forgets the setting sun and he goes home hugging against his bosom the little tin of potato salad which he bought for his supper--let the chilly autumn wind moan around him if it wants. More optimistic and ironic than Theodore Dreiser, Lewis has none the less devoted himself to the satire of American society. The feeling of the conflict between social and individual ethics, between the state of the _mores_ in America and the real needs of the individual citizen, inspired his work. “Main Street,” “Babbitt,” “Arrowsmith” and “Elmer Gantry” present the same plea. Let it not be said that the conflict between what the private man would like to do and what the social standards permit him to do is not peculiar to the United States. Doubtless there is nowhere a civilization without a society, and a society without suppression of some sort. But, if the criticisms which I have attempted to interpret impartially in these studies are true, it seems evident that the conflict in question is more tragic in America than anywhere else. Of all current social systems, that of the United States puts the greatest check on the individual as opposed to social expansion.[30]