He arrived at his room on Tavistock Place about eleven, and tried to think for the rest of the night of how deeply he was missing Morton of the cattle-boat now that--now that he had no friend in all the hostile world.
In a London A. B. C. restaurant Mr. Wrenn was talking to an American who had a clipped mustache, brisk manners, a Knight-of-Pythias pin, and a mind for duck-shooting, hardware-selling, and cigars.
"No more England for mine," the American snapped, good-humoredly. "I'm going to get out of this foggy hole and get back to God's country just as soon as I can. I want to find out what's doing at the store, and I want to sit down to a plate of flapjacks. I'm good and plenty sick of tea and marmalade. Why, I wouldn't take this fool country for a gift. No, sir! Me for God's country--Sleepy Eye, Brown County, Minnesota. You bet!"
"You don't like England much, then?" Mr. Wrenn carefully reasoned.
"Like it? Like this damp crowded hole, where they can't talk English, and have a fool coinage--Say, that's a great system, that metric system they've got over in France, but here--why, they don't know whether Kansas City is in Kansas or Missouri or both.... `Right as rain'--that's what a fellow said to me for `all right'! Ever hear such nonsense?.... And tea for breakfast! Not for me! No, sir! I'm going to take the first steamer!"
With a gigantic smoke-puff of disgust the man from Sleepy Eye stalked out, jingling the keys in his trousers pocket, cocking up his cigar, and looking as though he owned the restaurant.
Mr. Wrenn, picturing him greeting the Singer Tower from an incoming steamer, longed to see the tower.
"Gee! I'll do it!"
He rose and, from that table in the basement of an A. B. C. restaurant, he fled to America.
He dashed up-stairs, fidgeted while the cashier made his change, rang for a bus, whisked into his room, slammed his things into his suit-case, announced to it wildly that they were going home, and scampered to the Northwestem Station. He walked nervously up and down till the Liverpool train departed. "Suppose Istra wanted to make up, and came back to London?" was a terrifying thought that hounded him. He dashed into the waiting-room and wrote to her, on a souvenir post-card showing the Abbey: "Called back to America--will write. Address care of Souvenir Company, Twenty-eighth Street." But he didn't mail the card.
Once settled in a second-class compartment, with the train in motion, he seemed already much nearer America, and, humming, to the great annoyance of a lady with bangs, he planned his new great work--the making of friends; the discovery, some day, if Istra should not relent, of "somebody to go home to." There was no end to the "societies and lodges and stuff" he was going to join directly he landed.