Miggleton's restaurant, on Forty-second Street, was a romantic discovery. Though it had "popular prices"-plain omelet, fifteen cents-it had red and green bracket lights, mission-style tables, and music played by a sparrowlike pianist and a violinist. Mr. Wrenn never really heard the music, but while it was quavering he had a happier appreciation of the Silk-Hat-Harry humorous pictures in the Journal, which he always propped up against an oil-cruet. [That never caused him inconvenience; he had no convictions in regard to salads.] He would drop the paper to look out of the window at the Lazydays Improvement Company's electric sign, showing gardens of paradise on the instalment plan, and dream of-well, he hadn't the slightest idea what-something distant and deliciously likely to become intimate. Once or twice he knew that he was visioning the girl in soft brown whom he would "go home to," and who, in a Lazydays suburban residence, would play just such music for him and the friends who lived near by. She would be as clever as Istra, but "oh, more so's you can go regular places with her."... Often he got good ideas about letters South, to be jotted down on envelope backs, from that music.
At last comes the historic match-box incident.
On that October evening in 1910 he dined early at Miggleton's. The thirty-cent table d'hote was perfect. The cream-of-corn soup was, he went so far as to remark to the waitress, "simply slick"; the Waldorf salad had two whole walnuts in his portion alone.
The fat man with the white waistcoat, whom he had often noted as dining in this same corner of the restaurant, smiled at him and said "Pleasant evening" as he sat down opposite Mr. Wrenn and smoothed the two sleek bangs which decorated the front of his nearly bald head.
The music included a "potpourri of airs from `The Merry Widow,'" which set his foot tapping. All the while he was conscious that he'd made the Seattle Novelty and Stationery Corner Store come through with a five-hundred-dollar order on one of his letters.
The Journal contained an editorial essay on "Friendship" which would have been, and was, a credit to Cicero.
He laid down the paper, stirred his large cup of coffee, and stared at the mother-of-pearl buttons on the waistcoat of the fat man, who was now gulping down soup, opposite him. "My land!" he was thinking, "friendship! I ain't even begun to make all those friends I was going to. Haven't done a thing. Oh, I will; I must!"
"Nice night," said the fat man.
"Yuh-it sure is," brightly agreed Mr. Wrenn.
"Reg'lar Indian-Summer weather."
"Yes, isn't it! I feel like taking a walk on Riverside Drive-b'lieve I will."
"Wish I had time. But I gotta get down to the store-cigar-store. I'm on nights, three times a week."
"Yuh. I've seen you here most every time I eat early," Mr. Wrenn purred.
"Yuh. The rest of the time I eat at the boarding-house."
Silence. But Mr. Wrenn was fighting for things to say, means of approach, for the chance to become acquainted with a new person, for all the friendly human ways he had desired in nights of loneliness.
"Wonder when they'll get the Grand Central done?" asked the fat man.
"I s'pose it'll take quite a few years," said Mr. Wrenn, conversationally.
"Yuh. I s'pose it will."
Silence.
Mr. Wrenn sat trying to think of something else to say. Lonely people in city restaurants simply do not get acquainted. Yet he did manage to observe, "Great building that'll be," in the friendliest manner.
Silence.
Then the fat man went on:
"Wonder what Wolgast will do in his mill? Don't believe he can stand up."
Wolgast was, Mr. Wrenn seemed to remember, a pugilist. He agreed vaguely:
"Pretty hard, all right."
"Go out to the areoplane meet?" asked the fat man.
"No. But I'd like to see it. Gee! there must be kind of-kind of adventure in them things, heh?"
"Yuh-sure is. First machine I saw, though-I was just getting off the train at Belmont Park, and there was an areoplane up in the air, and it looked like one of them big mechanical beetles these fellows sell on the street buzzing around up there. I was kind of disappointed. But what do you think? It was that J. A. D. McCurdy, in a Curtiss biplane-I think it was-and by golly! he got to circling around and racing and tipping so's I thought I'd loose my hat off, I was so excited. And, say, what do you think? I see McCurdy himself, afterward, standing near one of the-the handgars-handsome young chap, not over twenty-eight or thirty, built like a half-miler. And then I see Ralph Johnstone and Arch Hoxey-"
"Gee!" Mr. Wrenn was breathing.
"-dipping and doing the-what do you call it?-Dutch sausage-roll or something like that. Yelled my head off."
"Oh, it must have been great to see 'em, and so close, too."
"Yuh-it sure was."
There seemed to be no other questions to settle. Mr. Wrenn slowly folded up his paper, pursued his check under three plates and the menu-card to its hiding-place beyond the catsup-bottle, and left the table with a regretful "Good night."
At the desk of the cashier, a decorative blonde, he put a cent in the machine which good-naturedly drops out boxes of matches. No box dropped this time, though he worked the lever noisily.
"Out of order?" asked the cashier lady. "Here's two boxes of matches. Guess you've earned them."
"Well, well, well, well!" sounded the voice of his friend, the fat man, who stood at the desk paying his bill. "Pretty easy, heh? Two boxes for one cent! Sting the restaurant." Cocking his head, he carefully inserted a cent in the slot and clattered the lever, turning to grin at Mr. Wrenn, who grinned back as the machine failed to work.
"Let me try it," caroled Mr. Wrenn, and pounded the lever with the enthusiasm of comradeship.
"Nothing doing, lady," crowed the fat man to the cashier.
"I guess I draw two boxes, too, eh? And I'm in a cigar-store. How's that for stinging your competitors, heh? Ho, ho, ho!"
The cashier handed him two boxes, with an embarrassed simper, and the fat man clapped Mr. Wrenn's shoulder joyously.
"My turn!" shouted a young man in a fuzzy green hat and a bright-brown suit, who had been watching with the sudden friendship which unites a crowd brought together by an accident.
Mr. Wrenn was glowing. "No, it ain't-it's mine," he achieved. "I invented this game." Never had he so stood forth in a crowd. He was a Bill Wrenn with the cosmopolitan polish of a floor-walker. He stood beside the fat man as a friend of sorts, a person to be taken perfectly seriously.
It is true that he didn't add to this spiritual triumph the triumph of getting two more boxes of matches, for the cashier-girl exclaimed, "No indeedy; it's my turn!" and lifted the match machine to a high shelf behind her. But Mr. Wrenn went out of the restaurant with his old friend, the fat man, saying to him quite as would a wit, "I guess we get stung, eh?"
"Yuh!" gurgled the fat man.
Walking down to your store?"
"Yuh-sure-won't you walk down a piece?"
"Yes, I would like to. Which way is it?"
"Fourth Avenue and Twenty-eighth."
"Walk down with you."
"Fine!"
And the fat man seemed to mean it. He confided to Mr. Wrenn that the fishing was something elegant at Trulen, New Jersey; that he was some punkins at the casting of flies in fishing; that he wished exceedingly to be at Trulen fishing with flies, but was prevented by the manager of the cigar-store; that the manager was an old devil; that his (the fat man's own) name was Tom Poppins; that the store had a slick new brand of Manila cigars, kept in a swell new humidor bought upon the advice of himself (Mr. Poppins); that one of the young clerks in the store had done fine in the Modified Marathon; that the Cubs had had a great team this year; that he'd be glad to give Mr.-Mr. Wrenn, eh?-one of those Manila cigars-great cigars they were, too; and that he hadn't "laughed so much for a month of Sundays as he had over the way they stung Miggleton's on them matches."