III
Every Saturday afternoon he hustled out to his country
club and hustled through nine holes of golf as a rest after
the week's hustle.
In Zenith it was as necessary for a Successful Man to
belong to a country club as it was to wear a linen collar.
Babbitt's was the Outing Golf and Country Club, a pleasant
gray-shingled building with a broad porch, on a daisy-starred
cliff above Lake Kennepoose. There was another, the Tonawanda
Country Club, to which belonged Charles McKelvey,
Horace Updike, and the other rich men who lunched not at
the Athletic but at the Union Club. Babbitt explained with
frequency, "You couldn't hire me to join the Tonawanda, even
if I did have a hundred and eighty bucks to throw away on
the initiation fee. At the Outing we've got a bunch of real
human fellows, and the finest lot of little women in town—
just as good at joshing as the men—but at the Tonawanda
there's nothing but these would-be's in New York get-ups,
drinking tea! Too much dog altogether. Why, I wouldn't
join the Tonawanda even if they— I wouldn't join it on
a bet!''
When he had played four or five holes, he relaxed a bit, his
tobacco-fluttering heart beat more normally, and his voice
slowed to the drawling of his hundred generations of peasant
ancestors.
