Mr. Wrenn set off for home in a high state of exhilaration which, he noticed, exactly resembled driving an aeroplane, and went briskly up the steps of the Zapps' genteel but unexciting residence. He was much nearer to heaven than West Sixteenth Street appears to be to the outsider. For he was an explorer of the Arctic, a trusted man on the job, an associate of witty Bohemians. He was an army lieutenant who had, with his friend the hawk-faced Pinkerton man, stood off bandits in an attack on a train. He opened and closed the door gaily.
He was an apologetic little Mr. Wrenn. His landlady stood on the bottom step of the hall stairs in a bunchy Mother Hubbard, groaning: "Mist' Wrenn, if you got to come in so late, Ah wish you wouldn't just make all the noise you can. Ah don't see why Ah should have to be kept awake all night. Ah suppose it's the will of the Lord that whenever Ah go out to see Mrs. Muzzy and just drink a drop of coffee Ah must get insomina, but Ah don't see why anybody that tries to be a gennulman should have to go and bang the door and just rack mah nerves."
He slunk up-stairs behind Mrs. Zapp's lumbering gloom.
"There's something I wanted to tell you, Mrs. Zapp--something that's happened to me. That's why I was out celebrating last evening and got in so late." Mr. Wrenn was diffidently sitting in the basement.
"Yes," dryly, "Ah noticed you was out late, Mist' Wrenn."
"You see, Mrs. Zapp, I--uh--my father left me some land, and it's been sold for about one thousand plunks."
" Ah'm awful' glad, Mist' Wrenn," she said, funereally. "Maybe you'd like to take that hall room beside yours now. The two rooms'd make a nice apartment." (She really said "nahs 'pahtmun', "you understand.) "Why, I hadn't thought much about that yet." He felt guilty, and was profusely cordial to Lee Theresa Zapp, the factory forewoman, who had just thumped down-stairs.
Miss Theresa was a large young lady with a bust, much black hair, and a handsome disdainful discontented face. She waited till he had finished greeting her, then sniffed, and at her mother she snarled: "Ma, they went and kept us late again to-night. I'm getting just about tired of having a bunch of Jews and Yankees think I'm a nigger. Uff! I hate them!"
"T'resa, Mist' Wrenn's just inherited two thousand dollars, and he's going to take that upper hall room." Mrs. Zapp beamed with maternal fondness at the timid lodger.
But the gallant friend of Pinkertons faced her--for the first time. "Waste his travel-money?" he was inwardly exclaiming as he said: "But I thought you had some one in that room. I heard som--"