"Yes, wouldn't it?... I wanted to work in the book department one time. It's so nice your being-"
"Ready for Five Hundred?" bellowed Tom Poppins in the hall below. "Ready partner-you, Wrenn?"
Tom was to initiate Mr. Wrenn into the game, playing with him against Mrs. Arty and Miss Mary Proudfoot.
Mrs. Arty sounded the occasion's pitch of high merriment by delivering from the doorway the sacred old saying, "Well, the ladies against the men, eh?"
A general grunt that might be spelled "Hmmmmhm" assented.
"I'm a good suffragette," she added. "Watch us squat the men, Mary."
"Like to smash windows? Let's see-it's red fours, black fives up?" remarked Tom, as he prepared the pack of cards for playing.
"Yes, I would! It makes me so tired," asseverated Mrs. Arty, "to think of the old goats that men put up for candidates when they know they're solemn old fools! I'd just like to get out and vote my head off."
"Well, I think the woman's place is in the home," sniffed Miss Proudfoot, decisively, tucking away a doily she was finishing for the Women's Exchange and jabbing at her bangs.
They settled themselves about the glowing, glancing, glittering, golden-oak center-table. Miss Proudfoot shuffled sternly. Mr. Wrenn sat still and frightened, like a shipwrecked professor on a raft with two gamblers and a press-agent, though Nelly was smiling encouragingly at him from the couch where she had started her embroidery-a large Christmas lamp mat for the wife of the Presbyterian pastor at Upton's Grove.
"Don't you wish your little friend Horatio Hood Teddem was here to play with you?" remarked Tom.
"I do not," declared Mrs. Arty. "Still, there was one thing about Horatio. I never had to look up his account to find out how much he owed me. He stopped calling me, Little Buttercup, when he owed me ten dollars, and he even stopped slamming the front door when he got up to twenty. O Mr. Wrenn, did I ever tell you about the time I asked him if he wanted to have Annie sweep-"
"Gerty!" protested Miss Proudfoot, while Nelly, on the couch, ejaculated mechanically, "That story!" but Mrs. Arty chuckled fatly, and continued:
"I asked him if he wanted me to have Annie sweep his nightshirt when she swept his room. He changed it next day."
"Your bid, Mr. Poppins, "said Miss Proudfoot, severely.
"First, I want to tell Wrenn how to play. You see, Wrenn, here's the schedule. We play Avondale Schedule, you know."
"Oh yes," said Mr. Wrenn, timorously.... He had once heard of Carbondale-in New Jersey or Pennsylvania or somewhere-but that didn't seem to help much.
"Well, you see, you either make or go back," continued Tom. "Plus and minus, you know. Joker is high, then right bower, left, and ace. Then-uh-let's see; high bid takes the cat-widdie, you know-and discards. Ten tricks. Follow suit like whist, of course. I guess that's all-that ought to give you the hang of it, anyway. I bid six on no trump."
As Tom Poppins finished these instructions, given in the card-player's rapid don't-ask-me-any-more-fool-questions manner, Mr. Wrenn felt that he was choking. He craned up his neck, trying to ease his stiff collar. So, then, he was a failure, a social outcast already.
So, then, he couldn't learn Five Hundred! And he had been very proud of knowing one card from another perfectly, having played a number of games of two-handed poker with Tim on the cattle-boat. But what the dickens did "left-cat-follow suit" mean?
And to fail with Nelly watching him! He pulled at his collar again.
Thus he reflected while Mrs. Arty and Tom were carrying on the following brilliant but cryptic society-dialogue:
Mrs. Arty: Well, I don't know.
Tom: Not failure, but low bid is crime, little one.
Mrs. Arty: Mary, shall I make-
Tom: Hey! No talking 'cross table!
Mrs. Arty: Um-let-me-see.
Tom: Bid up, bid up! Bid a little seven on hearts?
Mrs. Arty: Just for that I will bid seven on hearts, smarty!
Tom: Oh, how we will squat you!... What you bidding, Wrenn?
Behind Mr. Wrenn, Nelly Croubel whispered to him: "Bid seven on no suit. You've got the joker." Her delicate forefinger, its nail shining, was pointing at a curious card in his hand.
"Seven nosut," he mumbled.
"Eight hearts," snapped Miss Proudfoot.
Nelly drew up a chair behind Mr. Wrenn's. He listened to her soft explanations with the desperate respect and affection which a green subaltern would give to a general in battle.
Tom and he won the hand. He glanced back at Nelly with awe, then clutched his new hand, fearfully, dizzily, staring at it as though it might conceal one of those malevolent deceivers of which Nelly had just warned him-a left bower.
"Good! Spades-see," said Nelly.
Fifteen minutes later Mr. Wrenn felt that Tom was hoping he would lead a club. He played one, and the whole table said: "That's right. Fine!"
On his shoulder he felt a light tap, and he blushed like a sunset as he peeped back at Nelly.
Mr. Wrenn, the society light, was Our Mr. Wrenn of the Souvenir Company all this time. Indeed, at present he intended to keep on taking The Job seriously until that most mistily distant time, which we all await, "when something turns up." His fondling of the Southern merchants was showing such results that he had grown from an interest in whatever papers were on his desk to a belief in the divine necessity of The Job as a whole. Not now, as of old, did he keep the personal letters in his desk tied up, ready for a sudden departure for Vienna or Kamchatka. Also, he wished to earn much more money for his new career of luxury. Mr. Guilfogle had assured him that there might be chances ahead-business had been prospering, two new road salesmen and a city-trade man had been added to the staff, and whereas the firm had formerly been jobbers only, buying their novelties from manufacturers, now they were having printed for them their own Lotsa-Snap Cardboard Office Mottoes, which were making a big hit with the trade.
Through his friend Rabin, the salesman, Mr. Wrenn got better acquainted with two great men-Mr. L. J. Glover, the purchasing agent of the Souvenir Company, and John Hensen, the newly engaged head of motto manufacturing. He "wanted to get onto all the different lines of the business so's he could step right in anywhere"; and from these men he learned the valuable secrets of business wherewith the marts of trade build up prosperity for all of us: how to seat a selling agent facing the light, so you can see his face better than he can see yours. How much ahead of time to telephone the motto-printer that "we've simply got to have proof this afternoon; what's the matter with you, down there? Don't you want our business any more?" He also learned something of the various kinds of cardboard and ink-well glass, though these, of course, were merely matters of knowledge, not of brilliant business tactics, and far less important than what Tom Poppins and Rabin called "handing out a snappy line of talk."
"Say, you're getting quite chummy lately-reg'lar society leader," Rabin informed him.
Mr. Wrenn's answer was in itself a proof of the soundness of Rabin's observation:
"Sure-I'm going to borrow some money from you fellows. Got to make an impression, see?"
A few hours after this commendation came Istra's second letter:
Mouse dear, I'm so glad to hear about the simpatico boarding- house. Yes indeed I would like to hear about the people in it. And you are reading history? That's good. I'm getting sick of Paris and some day I'm going to stop an absinthe on the boulevard and slap its face to show I'm a sturdy moving-picture Western Amurrican and then leap to saddle and pursue the bandit. I'm working like the devil but what's the use. That is I mean unless one is doing the job well, as I'm glad you are. My Dear, keep it up. You know I want you to be real whatever you are. I didn't mean to preach but you know I hate people who aren't real-that's why I haven't much of a flair for myself.