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Wrenn lay, with a scratch-pad on his raised knees and a small mean pillow doubled under his head, writing sample follow-up letters to present to the Souvenir and Art Novelty Company, interrupting his work at intervals to add to a list of the books which, beginning about five minutes after he landed in New York, he was going to master. He puzzled over Marie Corelli.
Wrenn yanked this bell-pull with an urbane briskness which, he hoped, would conceal his nervousness and delight in dining out. For he was one of the lonely men in New York. He had dined out four times in eight years. The woman of thirty-five or thirty-eight who opened the door to him was very fat, two-thirds as fat as Mrs. Zapp, but she had young eyes.
"Donegal, o' course. I was born there." Hauling from his pocket a pencil and a worn envelope, Mr. Wrenn joyously added the new point of interest to a list ranging from Delagoa Bay to Denver. He skipped up-town, looking at the stars. He shouted as he saw the stacks of a big Cunarder bulking up at the end of Fourteenth Street.
"Well " "I never got out of Liverpool! Worked in a restaurant.... But next time ! I'll go clean to Constantinople!" Morton exploded. "And I did see a lot of English life in Liverpool." Mr. Wrenn talked long and rapidly of the world's baseball series, and Regal vs. Walkover shoes. He tried to think of something they could do.
Wrenn, apparently fastened to New York like a domestic-minded barnacle, lay the possibilities of heroic roaming. He knew it. He, too, like the man who had taken the Gaumont pictures, would saunter among dusky Javan natives in "markets with tiles on the roofs and temples and and uh, well places!"
He felt that, while making his vast new circle of friends, he was losing all the wild adventurousness of Bill Wrenn. And he was parting with his first friend. At the ferry-house Morton pronounced his "Well, so long, old fellow" with an affection that meant finality. Mr. Wrenn fled back to Tom Poppins's store. On the way he was shocked to find himself relieved at having parted with Morton.
Mittyford waiting in awesome fur coat, goggles, and gauntlets, centered in the car-lamplight that loomed in the shivery evening fog. "Gee! just like a hero in a novel!" reflected Mr. Wrenn. "Get on your things," said the pedagogue. "I'm going to give you the time of your life." Mr. Wrenn obediently went up and put on his cap.
Guilfogle remarked into it: "Hello. Yes, it's me. Well, who did you think it was? The cat? Yuh. Sure. No. Well, to-morrow, probably. All right. Good-by." Then he glanced at his watch and up at Mr. Wrenn impatiently. "Say, Mr. Guilfogle, you say there'll be when will there be likely to be an opening?" "Now, how can I tell, my boy?
Through his friend Rabin, the salesman, Mr. Wrenn got better acquainted with two great men Mr. L. J. Glover, the purchasing agent of the Souvenir Company, and John Hensen, the newly engaged head of motto manufacturing.
Istra was going on, "I haven't been here long enough to be lonely yet, but in any case " when Mr. Wrenn interrupted: "You've hurt Tom's feelings by not taking any candy; and, gee, he's awful kind!" "Have I?" mockingly. "Yes, you have. And there ain't any too many kind people in this world." "Oh yes, of course you' re right. I am sorry, really I am."
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