"Of course, I'm terribly crude and vulgar, but then what else can you be in dealing with a bunch of churches that haven't half the size or beauty of farmers' red barns? And yet the dubs go on asserting that they believe the church is God's house. If I were God, I'd sure object to being worse housed than the cattle. But, gosh! let's pass that up. If I started in on what I think of almost anything--churches or schools, or this lying advertising game--I'd yelp all night, and you could always answer me that I'm merely a neurotic failure, while the big guns that I jump on own motor-cars." He stopped his rapid tirade, chucked a lump of sugar at an interrogative cat which was making the round of the tables, scowled, and suddenly fired at her: "What do you think of me?" "You're the kindest person I ever met." "Huh? Kind? Good to my mother?" "Perhaps. You've made the office happy for me. I really admire you.... I s'pose I'm terribly unladylike to tell you." "Gee whiz!" he marveled. "Got an admirer! And I always thought you were an uncommonly level-headed girl. Shows how you can fool 'em." He smiled at her, directly, rather forlornly, proud of her praise. Regardless of other tables, he thrust his arm across, and with the side of his hand touched the side of hers for a second. Dejectedly he said: "But why do you like me? I've good intentions; I'm willing to pinch Tolstoi's laurels right off his grave, and orate like William Jennings Bryan. And there's a million yearners like me. There ain't a hall-bedroom boy in New York that wouldn't like to be a genius." "I like you because you have fire. Mr. Babson, do you--" "Walter!" "How premature you are!" "Walter!" "You'll be calling me 'Una' next, and think how shocked the girls will be." "Oh no. I've quite decided to call you 'Goldie.' Sounds nice and sentimental. But for heaven's sake go on telling me why you like me. That isn't a hackneyed subject." "Oh, I've never known anybody with _fire_, except maybe S. Herbert Ross, and he--he--" "He blobs around." "Yes, something like that. I don't know whether you are ever going to do anything with your fire, but you do have it, Mr. Babson!" "I'll probably get fired with it.... Say, do you read Omar?" In nothing do the inarticulate "million hall-room boys who want to be geniuses," the ordinary, unshaved, not over-bathed, ungrammatical young men of any American city, so nearly transcend provincialism as in an enthusiasm over their favorite minor cynic, Elbert Hubbard or John Kendrick Bangs, or, in Walter Babson's case, Mr. Fitzgerald's variations on Omar. Una had read Omar as a pretty poem about roses and murmurous courts, but read him she had; and such was Walter's delight in that fact that he immediately endowed her with his own ability to enjoy cynicism. He jabbed at the menu with a fork and glowed and shouted, "Say, isn't it great, that quatrain about 'Take the cash and let the credit go'?"