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
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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