Our Mr. Wrenn

"No, I'm afraid not; I'm just a kind of clerk."

"Good! Good! My dear sir--whom I've never seen before--have I? By the way, please don't think I usually pick up stray gentlemen and talk to them about my pure white soul. But you, you know, made stories about me.... I was saying: If you could only know how I loathe and hate and despise Interesting People just now! I've seen so much of them. They talk and talk and talk--they're just like Kipling's bandar-log--What is it?

"See us rise in a flung festoon Half-way up to the jealous moon. Don't you wish you-could know all about art and economics as we do?' That's what they say. Umph!"

Then she wriggled her fingers in the air like white butterflies, shrugged her shoulders elaborately, rose from the rail, and sat down beside him on the steps, quite matter-of-factly.

He gould feel his temple-pulses beat with excitement.

She turned her pale sensitive vivid face slowly toward him.

"When did you see me--to make up the story?"

"Breakfasts. At Mrs. Cattermole's."

"Oh yes.... How is it you aren't out sight-seeing? Or is it blessedly possible that you aren't a tripper--a tourist?"

"Why, I dunno." He hunted uneasily for the right answer. "Not exactly. I tried a stunt--coming over on a cattle-boat."

"That's good. Much better."

She sat silent while, with enormous and self-betraying pains to avoid detection, he studied her firm thin brilliantly red lips. At last he tried: "Please tell me something about London. Some of you English-- Oh, I dunno. I can't get acquainted easily."

"My dear child, I'm not English! I'm quite as American as yourself. I was born in California. I never saw England till two years ago, on my way to Paris. I'm an art student.... That's why my accent is so perishin' English--I can't afford to be just ordinary British, y' know."

Her laugh had an October tang of bitterness in it.

"Well, I'll--say, what do you know about that!" he said, weakly.

"Tell me about yourself--since apparently we're now acquainted.... Unless you want to go to that music-hall?"

"Oh no, no, no! Gee, I was just crazy to have somebody to talk to--somebody nice--I was just about nutty, I was so lonely," all in a burst. He finished, hesitatingly, "I guess the English are kinda hard to get acquainted with."

"Lonely, eh?" she mused, abrupt and bluffly kind as a man, for all her modulating woman's voice. "You don't know any of the people here in the house?"

"No'm. Say, I guess we got rooms next to each other."

"How romantic!" she mocked.

"Wrenn's my name; William Wrenn. I work for--I used to work for the Souvenir and Art Novelty Company. In New York."