“Why, Mr. Wrenn, you’re a regular poet!”

He looked doubtful.

“Honest; I’m not teasing you; you are a poet.  And I think it’s fine that Mr. Teddem was saying that nobody could be a poet or like that unless they drank an awful lot and—­uh—­oh, not be honest and be on a job.  But you aren’t like that. Are you?”

He looked self-conscious and mumbled, earnestly, “Well, I try not to be.”

“But I am going to make you go to church.  You’ll be a socialist or something like that if you get to be too much of a poet and don’t—­”

“Miss Nelly, please may I go to church with you?”

“Why—­”

“Next Sunday?”

“Why, yes, I should be pleased.  Are you a Presbyterian, though?”

“Why—­uh—­I guess I’m kind of a Congregationalist; but still, they’re all so much alike.”

“Yes, they really are.  And besides, what does it matter if we all believe the same and try to do right; and sometimes that’s hard, when you’re poor, and it seems like—­like—­”

“Seems like what?” Mr. Wrenn insisted.

“Oh—­nothing....  My, you’ll have to get up awful early Sunday morning if you’d like to go with me.  My church starts at ten-thirty.”

“Oh, I’d get up at five to go with you.”

“Stupid!  Now you’re just trying to jolly me; you are; because you men aren’t as fond of church as all that, I know you aren’t.  You’re real lazy Sunday mornings, and just want to sit around and read the papers and leave the poor women—­But please tell me some more about your reading and all that.”

“Well, I’ll be all ready to go at nine-thirty....  I don’t know; why, I haven’t done much reading.  But I would like to travel and—­Say, wouldn’t it be great to—­I suppose I’m sort of a kid about it; of course, a guy has to tend right to business, but it would be great—­Say a man was in Europe with—­with—­a friend, and they both knew a lot of history—­say, they both knew a lot about Guy Fawkes (he was the guy that tried to blow up the English Parliament), and then when they were there in London they could almost think they saw him, and they could go round together and look at Shelley’s window—­he was a poet at Oxford—­Oh, it would be great with a—­with a friend.”

“Yes, wouldn’t it?...  I wanted to work in the book department one time.  It’s so nice your being—­”

“Ready for Five Hundred?” bellowed Tom Poppins in the hall below.  “Ready partner—­you, Wrenn?”

Tom was to initiate Mr. Wrenn into the game, playing with him against Mrs. Arty and Miss Mary Proudfoot.

Mrs. Arty sounded the occasion’s pitch of high merriment by delivering from the doorway the sacred old saying, “Well, the ladies against the men, eh?”

A general grunt that might be spelled “Hmmmmhm” assented.

“I’m a good suffragette,” she added.  “Watch us squat the men, Mary.”

“Like to smash windows?  Let’s see—­it’s red fours, black fives up?” remarked Tom, as he prepared the pack of cards for playing.