Dodsworth by Sinclair Lewis

Thomas J. Pearson and Samuel Dodsworth had always been too well acquainted to know each other. They had been together since boyhood. Each was a habit to the other. It had been a habit for Tub to go once a week to Sam's for poker; a habit for Sam to telephone him for lunch every Tuesday or Wednesday. They analyzed each other, they considered each other as individuals, no more than a man considers the virtues of his own several toes, unless they hurt. Even Sam's absence from Tub at technical school, after college, had given them no understanding of each other. They were under the spell of the collegiate belief that one's classmates are the most princely fellows ever known in history.

But in Sam's six months abroad, Tub had grown into new habits. It was to the house of Dr. Henry Hazzard that Tub looked now for his weekly drug of poker. Sam saw that Hazzard was at least as necessary to Tub as himself, now, and sometimes he found himself allied against the two of them when the talk fell on labor or European alliances and they expressed the fat opinions which Sam himself had once accepted but about which he now felt shaky. He was slightly jealous, slightly critical. He noted that Tub wasn't quite so perfect as he had remembered. When Tub shrieked, during a game of poker, "What ho' said the cat to the catamaran" or "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the ante" Sam was not diverted. And he felt that Tub was as critical of him. If he hinted that the paving on Conklin Avenue was bad, or that the coffee at the country club left something to be desired, Tub scolded, "Oh, God, we expatriates certainly are a hard bunch to please!"