"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."
"Oh. I see. Novelties? Nice little ash-trays with `Love from the Erie Station'? And woggly pin-cushions?"
"Yes! And fat pug-dogs with black eyes."
"Oh no-o-o! Please not black! Pale sympathetic blue eyes-nice honest blue eyes!"
"Nope. Black. Awful black.... Say, gee, I ain't talking too nutty, am I?"
"`Nutty'? You mean `idiotically'? The slang's changed since-Oh yes, of course; you've succeeded in talking quite nice and `idiotic.'"
"Oh, say, gee, I didn't mean to-When you been so nice and all to me-"
"Don't apologize!" Istra Nash demanded, savagely. "Haven't they taught you that?"
"Yes'm," he mumbled, apologetically.
She sat silent again, apparently not at all satisfied with the architecture of the opposite side of Tavistock Place. Diffidently he edged into speech:
"Honest, I did think you was English. You came from California? Oh, say, I wonder if you've ever heard of Dr. Mittyford. He's some kind of school-teacher. I think he teaches in Leland Stamford College."
"Leland Stanford? You know him?" She dropped into interested familiarity.
"I met him at Oxford."
"Really?... My brother was at Stanford. I think I've heard him speak of-Oh yes. He said that Mittyford was a cultural climber, if you know what I mean; rather-oh, how shall I express it?-oh, shall we put it, finicky about things people have just told him to be finicky about."
"Yes!" glowed Mr. Wrenn.
To the luxury of feeling that he knew the unusual Miss Istra Nash he sacrificed Dr. Mittyford, scholarship and eye-glasses and Shelley and all, without mercy.
"Yes, he was awfully funny. Gee! I didn't care much for him."
"Of course you know he's a great man, however?" Istra was as bland as though she had meant that all along, which left Mr. Wrenn nowhere at all when it came to deciding what she meant.
Without warning she rose from the steps, flung at him "G' night," and was off down the street.
Sitting alone, all excited happiness, Mr. Wrenn muttered: "Ain't she a wonder! Gee! she's striking-lookin'! Gee whittakers!"
Some hours later he said aloud, tossing about in bed: "I wonder if I was too fresh. I hope I wasn't. I ought to be careful."
He was so worried about it that he got up and smoked a cigarette, remembered that he was breaking still another rule by smoking too much, then got angry and snapped defiantly at his suit-case: "Well, what do I care if I am smoking too much? And I'll be as fresh as I want to." He threw a newspaper at the censorious suit-case and, much relieved, went to bed to dream that he was a rabbit making enormously amusing jests, at which he laughed rollickingly in half-dream, till he realized that he was being awakened by the sound of long sobs from the room of Istra Nash.
Afternoon; Mr. Wrenn in his room. Miss Nash was back from tea, but there was not a sound to be heard from her room, though he listened with mouth open, bent forward in his chair, his hands clutching the wooden seat, his finger-tips rubbing nervously back and forth over the rough under-surface of the wood. He wanted to help her-the wonderful lady who had been sobbing in the night. He had a plan, in which he really believed, to say to her, "Please let me help you, princess, jus' like I was a knight."
At last he heard her moving about. He rushed downstairs and waited on the stoop.
When she came out she glanced down and smiled contentedly. He was flutteringly sure that she expected to see him there. But all his plan of proffering assistance vanished as he saw her impatient eyes and her splendors of dress-another tight-fitting gown, of smoky gray, with faint silvery lights gliding along the fabric.
She sat on the rail above him, immediately, unhesitatingly, and answered his "Evenin'" cheerfully.
He wanted so much to sit beside her, to be friends with her. But, he felt, it took courage to sit beside her. She was likely to stare haughtily at him. However, he did go up to the rail and sit, shyly kicking his feet, beside her, and she did not stare haughtily. Instead she moved over an inch or two, glanced at him almost as though they were sharing a secret, and said, quietly:
"I thought quite a bit about you last evening. I believe you really have an imagination, even though you are a salesman-I mean so many don't; you know how it is."
"Oh yes."
You see, Mr. Wrenn didn't know he was commonplace.
"After I left here last night I went over to Olympia Johns', and she dragged me off to a play. I thought of you at it because there was an imaginative butler in it. You don't mind my comparing you to a butler, do you? He was really quite the nicest person in the play, y' know. Most of it was gorgeously rotten. It used to be a French farce, but they sent it to Sunday-school and gave it a nice fresh frock. It seemed that a gentleman-tabby had been trying to make a match between his nephew and his ward. The ward arted. Personally I think it was by tonsorial art. But, anyway, the uncle knew that nothing brings people together so well as hating the same person. You know, like hating the cousin, when you're a kiddy, hating the cousin that always keeps her nails clean?"
"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."