Our Mr. Wrenn

"So that's the way you're going to treat us!" bellowed Mrs. Zapp. "You go off and leave us with an unoccupied room and-- Oh! You poor white trash--you--"

"Ma! You shut up and go down-stairs-s-s-s-s!" Theresa hissed. "Go on."

Mrs. Zapp wabbled regally out. Lee Theresa spoke to Mr. Wrenn: "Ma ain't feeling a bit well this afternoon. I'm sorry she talked like that. You will come back, won't you?" She showed all her teeth in a genuine smile, and in her anxiety reached his heart. "Remember, you promised you would."

"Well, I will, but--"

Bill Wrenn was fading, an affrighted specter. The "but" was the last glimpse of him, and that Theresa overlooked, as she bustlingly chirruped: "I knew you would understand. I'll skip right up and look at the room and put on fresh sheets."

One month, one hot New York month, passed before the imperial Mr. Guilfogle gave him back The Job, and then at seventeen dollars and fifty cents a week instead of his former nineteen dollars. Mr. Wrenn refused, upon pretexts, to go out with the manager for a drink, and presented him with twenty suggestions for new novelties and circular letters. He rearranged the unsystematic methods of Jake, the cub, and two days later he was at work as though he had never in his life been farther from the Souvenir Company than Newark.