He was chilled into quietness till Papa Gouroff, the owner of the restaurant, arrived from above-stairs.  Papa Gouroff was a Russian Jew who had been a police spy in Poland and a hotel proprietor in Mogador, where he called himself Turkish and married a renegade Armenian.  He had a nose like a sickle and a neck like a blue-gum nigger.  He hoped that the place would degenerate into a Bohemian restaurant where liberal clergymen would think they were slumming, and barbers would think they were entering society, so he always wore a fez and talked bad Arabic.  He was local color, atmosphere, Bohemian flavor.  Mr. Wrenn murmured to Theresa: 

“Say, do you see that man?  He’s Signor Gouroff, the owner.  I’ve talked to him a lot of times.  Ain’t he great!  Golly! look at that beak of his.  Don’t he make you think of kiosks and hyrems and stuff?  Gee!  What does he make you think—­”

“He’s got on a dirty collar....  That waiter’s awful slow....  Would you please be so kind and pour me another glass of water?”

But when she reached the honied bourma she grew tolerant toward Mr. Wrenn.  She had two cups of cocoa and felt fat about the eyes and affectionate.  She had mentioned that there were good shows in town.  Now she resumed: 

“Have you been to `The Gold Brick’ yet?”

“No, I—­uh—­I don’t go to the theater much.”

“Gwendolyn Muzzy was telling me that this was the funniest show she’d ever seen.  Tells how two confidence men fooled one of those terrible little jay towns.  Shows all the funny people, you know, like they have in jay towns....  I wish I could go to it, but of course I have to help out the folks at home, so—­ Well....  Oh dear.”

“Say!  I’d like to take you, if I could.  Let’s go—­this evening!” He quivered with the adventure of it.

“Why, I don’t know; I didn’t tell Ma I was going to be out.  But—­oh, I guess it would be all right if I was with you.”

“Let’s go right up and get some tickets.”

“All right.”  Her assent was too eager, but she immediately corrected that error by yawning, “I don’t suppose I’d ought to go, but if you want to—­”

They were a very lively couple as they walked up.  He trickled sympathy when she told of the selfishness of the factory girls under her and the meanness of the superintendent over her, and he laughed several times as she remarked that the superintendent “ought to be boiled alive—­that’s what all lobsters ought to be,” so she repeated the epigram with such increased jollity that they swung up to the theater in a gale; and, once facing the ennuied ticket-seller, he demanded dollar seats just as though he had not been doing sums all the way up to prove that seventy-five-cent seats were the best he could afford.

The play was a glorification of Yankee smartness.  Mr. Wrenn was disturbed by the fact that the swindler heroes robbed quite all the others, but he was stirred by the brisk romance of money-making.  The swindlers were supermen—­blonde beasts with card indices and options instead of clubs.  Not that Mr. Wrenn made any observations regarding supermen.  But when, by way of commercial genius, the swindler robbed a young night clerk Mr. Wrenn whispered to Theresa, “Gee! he certainly does know how to jolly them, heh?”