“Yuh.  The rest of the time I eat at the boarding-house.”

Silence.  But Mr. Wrenn was fighting for things to say, means of approach, for the chance to become acquainted with a new person, for all the friendly human ways he had desired in nights of loneliness.

“Wonder when they’ll get the Grand Central done?” asked the fat man.

“I s’pose it’ll take quite a few years,” said Mr. Wrenn, conversationally.

“Yuh.  I s’pose it will.”

Silence.

Mr. Wrenn sat trying to think of something else to say.  Lonely people in city restaurants simply do not get acquainted.  Yet he did manage to observe, “Great building that’ll be,” in the friendliest manner.

Silence.

Then the fat man went on: 

“Wonder what Wolgast will do in his mill?  Don’t believe he can stand up.”

Wolgast was, Mr. Wrenn seemed to remember, a pugilist.  He agreed vaguely: 

“Pretty hard, all right.”

“Go out to the areoplane meet?” asked the fat man.

“No.  But I’d like to see it.  Gee! there must be kind of—­kind of adventure in them things, heh?”

“Yuh—­sure is.  First machine I saw, though—­I was just getting off the train at Belmont Park, and there was an areoplane up in the air, and it looked like one of them big mechanical beetles these fellows sell on the street buzzing around up there.  I was kind of disappointed.  But what do you think?  It was that J. A. D. McCurdy, in a Curtiss biplane—­I think it was—­and by golly! he got to circling around and racing and tipping so’s I thought I’d loose my hat off, I was so excited.  And, say, what do you think?  I see McCurdy himself, afterward, standing near one of the—­the handgars—­handsome young chap, not over twenty-eight or thirty, built like a half-miler.  And then I see Ralph Johnstone and Arch Hoxey—­”

“Gee!” Mr. Wrenn was breathing.

“—­dipping and doing the—­what do you call it?—­Dutch sausage-roll or something like that.  Yelled my head off.”

“Oh, it must have been great to see ’em, and so close, too.”

“Yuh—­it sure was.”

There seemed to be no other questions to settle.  Mr. Wrenn slowly folded up his paper, pursued his check under three plates and the menu-card to its hiding-place beyond the catsup-bottle, and left the table with a regretful “Good night.”

At the desk of the cashier, a decorative blonde, he put a cent in the machine which good-naturedly drops out boxes of matches.  No box dropped this time, though he worked the lever noisily.

“Out of order?” asked the cashier lady.  “Here’s two boxes of matches.  Guess you’ve earned them.”

“Well, well, well, well!” sounded the voice of his friend, the fat man, who stood at the desk paying his bill.  “Pretty easy, heh?  Two boxes for one cent!  Sting the restaurant.”  Cocking his head, he carefully inserted a cent in the slot and clattered the lever, turning to grin at Mr. Wrenn, who grinned back as the machine failed to work.