There were nine members of the staff, besides Babbitt and his partner
and father-in-law, Henry Thompson, who rarely came to the office. The
nine were Stanley Graff, the outside salesman--a youngish man given to
cigarettes and the playing of pool; old Mat Penniman, general utility
man, collector of rents and salesman of insurance--broken, silent, gray;
a mystery, reputed to have been a "crack" real-estate man with a firm
of his own in haughty Brooklyn; Chester Kirby Laylock, resident salesman
out at the Glen Oriole acreage development--an enthusiastic person with
a silky mustache and much family; Miss Theresa McGoun, the swift and
rather pretty stenographer; Miss Wilberta Bannigan, the thick, slow,
laborious accountant and file-clerk; and four freelance part-time
commission salesmen.

As he looked from his own cage into the main room Babbitt mourned,
"McGoun's a good stenog., smart's a whip, but Stan Graff and all those
bums--" The zest of the spring morning was smothered in the stale office
air.

Normally he admired the office, with a pleased surprise that he should
have created this sure lovely thing; normally he was stimulated by
the clean newness of it and the air of bustle; but to-day it seemed
flat--the tiled floor, like a bathroom, the ocher-colored metal ceiling,
the faded maps on the hard plaster walls, the chairs of varnished pale
oak, the desks and filing-cabinets of steel painted in olive drab. It
was a vault, a steel chapel where loafing and laughter were raw sin.

He hadn't even any satisfaction in the new water-cooler! And it was the
very best of water-coolers, up-to-date, scientific, and right-thinking.
It had cost a great deal of money (in itself a virtue). It possessed a
non-conducting fiber ice-container, a porcelain water-jar (guaranteed