Our Mr. Wrenn

"Yes! That's so!"

"So he turned nasty, and of course the nephew and ward clinched till death did them part--which, I'm very sorry to have to tell you, death wasn't decent enough to do on the stage. If the play could only have ended with everybody's funeral I should have called it a real happy ending."

Mr. Wrenn laughed gratefully, though uncertainly. He knew that she had made jokes for him, but he didn't exactly know what they were.

"The imaginative butler, he was rather good. But the rest--Ugh!"

"That must have been a funny play," he said, politely.

She looked at him sidewise and confided, "Will you do me a favor?"

"Oh yes, I--"

"Ever been married?"

He was frightfully startled. His "No" sounded as though he couldn't quite remember.

She seemed much amused. You wouldn't have believed that this superior quizzical woman who tapped her fingers carelessly on her slim exquisite knee had ever sobbed in the night.

"Oh, that wasn't a personal question," she said. "I just wanted to know what you're like. Don't you ever collect people? I do--chloroform 'em quite cruelly and pin their poor little corpses out on nice clean corks.... You live alone in New York, do you?"

"Y-yes."

"Who do you play with--know?"

"Not--not much of anybody. Except maybe Charley Carpenter. He's assistant bookkeeper for the Souvenir Company. "He had wanted to, and immediately decided not to, invent grandes mondes whereof he was an intimate.

"What do--oh, you know--people in New York who don't go to parties or read much--what do they do for amusement? I'm so interested in types."

"Well--" said he.

That was all he could say till he had digested a pair of thoughts: Just what did she mean by "types"? Had it something to do with printing stories? And what could he say about the people, anyway? He observed: "Oh, I don't know--just talk about--oh, cards and jobs and folks and things and--oh, you know; go to moving pictures and vaudeville and go to Coney Island and--oh, sleep."

"But you--?"

"Well, I read a good deal. Quite a little. Shakespeare and geography and a lot of stuff. I like reading."

"And how do you place Nietzsche?" she gravely desired to know.

"?"

"Nietzsche. You know--the German humorist."

"Oh yes--uh--let me see now; he's--uh--"

"Why, you remember, don't you? Haeckel and he wrote the great musical comedy of the century. And Matisse did the music--Matisse and Rodin."

"I haven't been to it," he said, vaguely. "...I don't know much German. Course I know a few words, like Spricken Sie Dutch and Bitty, sir, that Rabin at the Souvenir Company--he's a German Jew, I guess--learnt me.... But, say, isn't Kipling great! Gee! when I read Kim I can imagine I'm hiking along one of those roads in India just like I was there--you know, all those magicians and so on.... Readin's wonderful, ain't it!"