To EDITH WHARTON
 
  CHAPTER I

    THE towers of Zenith
        aspired above the morning mist;
           austere towers of steel
               and cement and limestone,
           sturdy as cliffs and delicate
               as silver rods.

    They were
           neither citadels
          nor churches,
           but frankly
               and beautifully office-buildings.

    The mist took
         pity on the fretted structures
               of earlier generations:
        the Post Office
               with its shingle-tortured mansard,
           the red brick minarets
               of hulking old houses,
         factories with stingy
               and sooted windows,
           wooden tenements colored like mud.

    The city
        was full of such grotesqueries,
           but the clean towers
            were thrusting them
                   from the business center,
         and on the farther hills
            were shining new houses,
           homes
         --they seemed--
           for laughter and tranquillity.

    Over a concrete bridge
        fled a limousine
               of long sleek hood
             and noiseless engine.

    These people in evening clothes
        were returning
               from an all-night rehearsal
                   of a Little Theater play,
           an artistic adventure considerably
              illuminated by champagne.

    Below the bridge
           curved a railroad,
         a maze of green
               and crimson lights.

    The New York Flyer
          boomed past,
           and twenty lines
               of polished steel
            leaped into the glare.

    In one
           of the skyscrapers the wires
         of the Associated Press
        were closing down.

    The telegraph operators wearily
          raised their celluloid eye-shades
              after a night of talking
                   with Paris and Peking.

    Through the building
           crawled the scrubwomen,
         yawning,
         their old shoes slapping.

    The dawn mist spun away.

    Cues of men with lunch-boxes
          clumped toward the immensity
               of new factories,
           sheets of glass
               and hollow tile,
         glittering shops
             where five thousand men
                  worked beneath one roof,
           pouring out the honest wares
             that would be sold
                   up the Euphrates and
                 across the veldt.

    The whistles
          rolled out
               in greeting a chorus cheerful
             as the April dawn;
        the song of labor
               in a city built
         --it seemed--
           for giants.

   II

    There was nothing
           of the giant
         in the aspect
               of the man
         who was
              beginning to awaken
                   on the sleeping-porch
                    of a Dutch Colonial
                            house in
             that residential district of Zenith
                  known as Floral Heights.

    His name
        was George F. Babbitt.

  He was forty-six
     years old now,
           in April,
         1920,
           and he made
               nothing in particular,
         neither butter
              nor shoes nor poetry,
           but he
            was nimble
                   in the calling of selling
                 houses for more than people
            could afford to pay.

    His large head was pink,
        his brown hair
            thin and dry.

    His face
        was babyish in slumber,
           despite his wrinkles
               and the red spectacle-dents
             on the slopes
                   of his nose.

    He was not fat
         but he
            was exceedingly well fed;
        his cheeks were pads,
           and the unroughened hand
              which lay helpless
                   upon the khaki-colored blanket
                was slightly puffy.

    He seemed prosperous,
           extremely married and unromantic;
        and altogether unromantic
            appeared this sleeping-porch,
           which looked
               on one sizable elm,
         two respectable grass-plots,
           a cement driveway,
         and a corrugated iron garage.

    Yet Babbitt
        was again
              dreaming of the fairy child,
           a dream more romantic
               than scarlet pagodas
             by a silver sea.

    For years the fairy child
        had come to him.

    Where others saw
         but Georgie Babbitt,
           she discerned gallant youth.

    She waited for him,
           in the darkness
               beyond mysterious groves.

    When at last
         he could slip
              away from the crowded house
         he darted to her.

    His wife,
           his clamoring friends,
         sought to follow,
           but he escaped,
         the girl fleet beside him,
           and they crouched
               together on a shadowy hillside.

    She was so slim,