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Updated: June 7, 2025
Wrenn, but she called him neither Billy nor anything else, and mostly she talked to Miss Proudfoot, smiling at him, but saying nothing when he managed to get out a jest about Mrs. Arty's chewing-gum. Wrenn started to explain how he had come to enter Istra's room. "Why shouldn't you?" Nelly asked, curtly, and turned to Miss Proudfoot.
In a few minutes he dashed to his bureau and brushed his thinning hair so nervously that he had to try three times for a straight parting. While brushing his eyebrows and mustache he solemnly contemplated himself in the mirror. "I look like a damn rabbit," he scorned, and marched half-way to Istra's room. He went back to change his tie to a navy-blue bow which made him appear younger.
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."
The ghost of Morton, dead and forgotten, was with him all next day, till he got home and unbelievably found on the staid black-walnut Zapp hat-rack a letter from Paris, in a gray foreign-appearing envelope with Istra's intensely black scrawl on it.
The sun crept out, with the warmth and the dust, and Istra's steps lagged. As they passed the outlying corner of a farm where a straw-stack was secluded in a clump of willows Istra smiled and sighed: "I'm pretty tired, dear. I'm going to sleep in that straw-stack. I've always wanted to sleep in a straw-stack. It's comme il faut for vagabonds in the best set, you know. And one can burrow.
And it was too late to change his clothes. It was six already. He stuck out his jaw, and remembered that he had planned to hide the "letter from the duke" in Istra's napkin that it might be the greater surprise. He sat down at their table. He tucked the letter into the napkin folds.
Wrenn was, and wanted to be away from there. He darted as from a spring when he heard Istra's voice, from the edge of the group, calling, "Come here a sec', Billy." She was standing with a chair-back for support, tired but smiling. "I can't get to sleep yet. Don't you want me to show you some of the buildings here?" "Oh yes!" "If Mrs. Stettinius can spare you!"
He artfully skirted the field of conversation by very West Sixteenth Street observations on a town through which they passed, while she merely smiled wearily, and at best remarked "Yes, that's so," whether it was so or not. He was reflecting: "Istra's terrible tired. I ought to take care of her." He stopped at the wood-pillared entrance of a temperance inn and commanded: "Come!
For he associated the papery surfaces with the apprehension he then had that Istra might give him up to the jag-toothed grin of Carson Haggerty, who would laugh him out of the room and out of Istra's world. He hated the poetic youth, and would gladly have broken all of Carson's teeth short off.
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