BABBITT

By Sinclair Lewis


To Edith Wharton




BABBITT




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.