Our Mr. Wrenn

Once Nelly landed beside him and bubblingly insisted on his coming out and trying to learn to dance. He brightened, but shyly remarked, "Oh no, I don't think I'd better." Just then the blackest-mustached and pearl-waistcoatedest of all the cigar salesmen came begging for a dance, and she was gone, with only: "Now get up your courage. I'm going to make you dance."

At the intermission he watched her cross the floor with the hateful cigar salesman, slender in her tight crisp new white mull, flourishing her fan and talking with happy rapidity. She sat down beside him. He said nothing; he still stared out across the glassy floor. She peeped at him curiously several times, and made a low tapping with her fan on the side of her chair.

She sighed a little. Cautiously, but very casually, she said, "Aren't you going to take me out for some refreshments, Mr. Wrenn?"

"Oh sure--I'm good enough to buy refreshments for her!" he said to himself.

Poor Mr. Wrenn; he had not gone to enough parties in Parthenon, and he hadn't gone to any in New York. At nearly forty he was just learning the drab sulkiness and churlishness and black jealousy of the lover.... To her: "Why didn't you go out with that guy with the black mustache?" He still stared straight ahead.

She was big-eyed, a tear showing. "Why, Billy--" was all she answered.

He clenched his hands to keep from bursting out with all the pitiful tears which were surging in his eyes. But he said nothing.

"Billy, what--"

He turned shyly around to her; his hand touched hers softly.

"Oh, I'm a beast," he said, rapidly, low, his undertone trembling to her ears through the laughter of a group next to them. "I didn't mean that, but I was--I felt like such a mutt--not being able to dance. Oh, Nelly, I'm awfully sorry. You know I didn't mean--Come on! Let's go get something to eat!"

As they consumed ice-cream, fudge, doughnuts, and chicken sandwiches at the refreshment counter they were very intimate, resenting the presence of others. Tom and Mrs. Arty joined them. Tom made Nelly light her first cigarette. Mr. Wrenn admired the shy way in which, taking the tiniest of puffs, she kept drawing out her cigarette with little pouts and nose wriggles and pretended sneezes, but he felt a lofty gladness when she threw it away after a minute, declaring that she'd never smoke again, and that she was going to make all three of her companions stop smoking, "now that she knew how horrid and sneezy it was, so there!"

With what he intended to be deep subtlety Mr. Wrenn drew her away to the barroom, and these two children, over two glasses of ginger-ale, looked their innocent and rustic love so plainly that Mrs. Arty and Tom sneaked away. Nelly cut out a dance, which she had promised to a cigar-maker, and started homeward with Mr. Wrenn.