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Updated: June 28, 2025
Perhaps for two or even three days more he would have to stay in this nauseating prison-land. This was the morning of August 3, 1910, two weeks after his arrival in London, and twenty-two days after victoriously reaching England, the land of romance. Mr. Wrenn was sulkily breakfasting at Mrs. Cattermole's Tea House, which Mrs.
"Hungh!" he grunted, as he jabbed at the fringed doily under the silly pink-and-white tea-cup on the green-and-white lacquered tray brought him by a fat waitress in a frilly apron which must have been made for a Christmas pantomime fairy who was not fat. "Hurump!" he snorted at the pictures of lambs and radishes and cathedrals and little duckies on Mrs. Cattermole's pink-and-white wall.
He viewed her carelessly, then intently. It was the freak lady of Mrs. Cattermole's Tea House the corsetless young woman of the tight-fitting crash gown and flame-colored hair. She was coming up the steps of his house. He made room for her with feverish courtesy.
Cattermole kept in a genteel fashion in a basement three doors from his rooming-house on Tavistock Place. After his night of fear and tragic portents he resented the general flowered-paper-napkin aspect of Mrs. Cattermole's establishment.
Wrenn walked out of Mrs. Cattermole's excellent establishment and heavily inspected the quiet Bloomsbury Street, with a cat's-meat-man stolidly clopping along the pavement, as loneliness rushed on him and he wondered what in the world he could do, he mused, "Gee! I bet that red-headed lady would be interestin' to know."
Cattermole's picture hard by. "What splendid colour; what a romantic gloom; what a flowing pencil and dexterous hand!" Lady Kew could delight in pictures, applaud good poetry, and squeeze out a tear over a good novel too.
She explained it all to him several times, and she stood him tea and muffins, and recalled Mrs. Cattermole's establishment with full attention to Mrs. Cattermole's bulbous but earnest nose. They dined at the Brevoort, and were back at nine-thirty; for, said Istra, she was "just a bit tired, Mouse." They stood at the door of Istra's room. Istra said, "You may come in just for a minute."
Then she wriggled her fingers in the air like white butterflies, shrugged her shoulders elaborately, rose from the rail, and sat down beside him on the steps, quite matter-of-factly. He gould feel his temple-pulses beat with excitement. She turned her pale sensitive vivid face slowly toward him. "When did you see me to make up the story?" "Breakfasts. At Mrs. Cattermole's."
His disapproval of the lambiness of Mrs. Cattermole's was turned to a feeling of comradeship with the other patrons as he turned, with the rest, to stare hostilely at a girl just entering. The talk in the room halted, startled. Mr. Wrenn gasped. With his head solemnly revolving, his eyes followed the young woman about his table to a table opposite. "A freak!
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