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\"It was a morning of artistic creation.\" By now we know Lewis is being ironic--this morning\'s \"masterpiece\" is an advertisement for cemetery plots. Babbitt enjoys a similarly ironic moment of \"heroism\" when he discovers a new way of quitting smoking. As you\'ll see, Babbitt is always trying to quit smoking, without ever succeeding. In fact, this pattern of failed good intentions holds true in other ways as well.
Babbitt telephones his best friend, Paul Riesling. (Throughout the novel you\'ll see that this friendship is one of the truly fulfilling relationships Babbitt has.) Paul Riesling manufactures roofing, but Babbitt still thinks of him as the promising violinist and poet he was in college, and treats him as a younger brother.
Babbitt spends the rest of the morning working, as Lewis shows us in great detail his moral and intellectual limitations. A real estate salesman might be expected to understand something about architecture, landscape gardening, and economics. Babbitt understands nothing about these subjects. He knows little about Zenith except its real estate prices. The political opinions he reflects on now are as unthinking and inconsistent as those he spouted while reading the morning newspaper: no one should be forced to join a labor union, but everyone should be forced to join the Chamber of Commerce. He supports Prohibition but likes a drink. He preaches ethics but isn\'t sure what they really are, and he\'s not so ethical he won\'t do business with an out-and-out crook, Jake Offutt.
These \"ethics\" are at work in Babbitt\'s dealings with the speculator Conrad Lyte. (In a wonderful bit of description, we see that Babbitt isn\'t the only one in Zenith greedy for material success. Below Lyte\'s eyes are hollows, \"as though silver dollars had been pressed against them and left an imprint\"--a superb image of the way Lyte\'s eyes and mind are focused on money.) Lyte has followed Babbitt\'s advice to quietly buy land a butcher needs to expand his shop. When the butcher comes to Babbitt and Lyte, they demand for the property twice the going price--and get it. Lewis doesn\'t want us to feel sorry for the butcher, who will make up his loss by overcharging his customers. He does want us to understand that this is the way \"honest\" businessmen in Zenith work.
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