“Maybe I would.”

“If she was a man?”

“Oh, yes-s!  Artists are so romantic.”

“But they ain’t on the job more ’n half the time,” he said, jealously.

“Yes, that’s so.”

His hand stole secretly, craftily skirting a cushion, to touch hers—­which she withdrew, laughing: 

“Hump-a!  You go hold your artist’s hand!”

“Oh, Miss Nelly!  When I told you about her myself!”

“Oh yes, of course.”

She was contrite, and they played Five Hundred animatedly all evening.

CHAPTER XVI

HE BECOMES MILDLY RELIGIOUS AND HIGHLY LITERARY

The hero of the one-act play at Hammerstein’s Victoria vaudeville theater on that December evening was, it appeared, a wealthy young mine-owner in disguise.  He was working for the “fake mine promoter” because he loved the promoter’s daughter with a love that passed all understanding except that of the girls in the gallery.  When the postal authorities were about to arrest the promoter our young hero saved him by giving him a real mine, and the ensuing kiss of the daughter ended the suspense in which Mr. Wrenn and Nelly, Mrs. Arty and Tom had watched the play from the sixth row of the balcony.

Sighing happily, Nelly cried to the group:  “Wasn’t that grand?  I got so excited!  Wasn’t that young miner a dear?”

“Awfully nice,” said Mr. Wrenn.  “And, gee! wasn’t that great, that office scene—­with that safe and the rest of the stuff—­just like you was in a real office.  But, say, they wouldn’t have a copying-press in an office like that; those fake mine promoters send out such swell letters; they’d use carbon copies and not muss the letters all up.”

“By gosh, that’s right!” and Tom nodded his chin toward his right shoulder in approval.  Nelly cried, “That’s so; they would”; while Mrs. Arty, not knowing what a copying-press was, appeared highly commendatory, and said nothing at all.

During the moving pictures that followed, Mr. Wrenn felt proudly that he was taken seriously, though he had known them but little over a month.  He followed up his conversational advantage by leading the chorus in wondering, “which one of them two actors the heroine was married to?” and “how much a week they get for acting in that thing?” It was Tom who invited them to Miggleton’s for coffee and fried oysters.  Mr. Wrenn was silent for a while.  But as they were stamping through the rivulets of wheel-tracks that crisscrossed on a slushy street-crossing Mr. Wrenn regained his advantage by crying, “Say, don’t you think that play ’d have been better if the promoter ’d had an awful grouch on the young miner and ’d had to crawfish when the miner saved him?”

“Why, yes; it would!” Nelly glowed at him.

“Wouldn’t wonder if it would,” agreed Tom, kicking the December slush off his feet and patting Mr. Wrenn’s back.