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.
The orders--yes, they were growing larger. The Southern salesmen
took him out to dinner sometimes. But he was shy of them. They
were so knowing and had so many smoking-room stories. He still
had not found the friends he desired.
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.
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