Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle ManLewis, Sinclair
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Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man
Lewis, Sinclair
Courtship -- Fiction; Love stories; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Middle-aged men -- United States -- Fiction
It’s not at all certain that Mr. Guilfogle should have yielded. What’s
the use of a manager if his underlings use judgment?
The next battle Mr. Wrenn lost. He had demanded a monthly holiday for
his stenographer. Mr. Guilfogle pointed out that she’d merely be the
worse off for a holiday, that it ’d make her discontented, that it was
a kindness to her to keep her mind occupied. Mr. Wrenn was, however,
granted a new typewriter, in a manner which revealed the fact that the
Souvenir Company was filled with almost too much mercy in permitting an
employee to follow his own selfish and stubborn desires.
You cannot trust these employees. Mr. Wrenn was getting so absorbed in
his work that he didn’t even act as though it was a favor when Mr.
Guilfogle allowed him to have his letters to the trade copied by carbon
paper instead of having them blurred by the wet tissue-paper of a
copy-book. The manager did grant the request, but he was justly
indignant at the curt manner of the rascal, whereupon our bumptious
revolutionist, our friend to anarchists and red-headed artists,
demanded a “raise” and said that he didn’t care a hang if the
[qualified] letters never went out. The kindness of chiefs! For Mr.
Guilfogle apologized and raised the madman’s wage from seventeen
dollars and fifty cents a week to his former nineteen dollars. [He had
expected eighteen dollars; he had demanded twenty-two dollars and fifty
cents; he was worth on the labor market from twenty-five to thirty
dollars; while the profit to the Souvenir Company from his work was
about sixty dollars minus whatever salary he got.]
Not only that. Mr. Guilfogle slapped him on the back and said: “You’re
doing good work, old man. It’s fine. I just don’t want you to be too
reckless.”
That night Wrenn worked till eight.
After his raise he could afford to go to the theater, since he was not
saving money for travel. He wrote small letters to Istra and read the
books he believed she would approve—a Paris Baedeker and the second
volume of Tolstoi’s _War and Peace_, which he bought at a second-hand
book-stall for five cents. He became interested in popular and
inaccurate French and English histories, and secreted any amount of
footnote anecdotes about Guy Fawkes and rush-lights and the divine
right of kings. He thought almost every night about making friends,
which he intended—just as much as ever—to do as soon as Sometime
arrived.
On the day on which one of the Southern merchants wrote him about his
son—“fine young fellow, sir—has every chance of rising to a lieutenancy
on the Atlanta police force”—Mr. Wrenn’s eyes were moist. Here was a
friend already. Sure. He would make friends. Then there was the cripple
with the Capitol Corner News and Souvenir Stand in Austin, Texas. Mr.
Wrenn secreted two extra Dixieland Ink-wells and a Yale football banner
and sent them to the cripple for his brothers, who were in the
Agricultural College.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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