“Sh-h-h-h-h-h!” said Theresa.

Every one made millions, victims and all, in the last act, as a proof of the social value of being a live American business man.  As they oozed along with the departing audience Mr. Wrenn gurgled: 

“That makes me feel just like I’d been making a million dollars.”  Masterfully, he proposed, “Say, let’s go some place and have something to eat.”

“All right.”

“Let’s—­I almost feel as if I could afford Rector’s, after that play; but, anyway, let’s go to Allaire’s.”

Though he was ashamed of himself for it afterward, he was almost haughty toward his waiter, and ordered Welsh rabbits and beer quite as though he usually breakfasted on them.  He may even have strutted a little as he hailed a car with an imaginary walking-stick.  His parting with Miss Theresa was intimate; he shook her hand warmly.

As he undressed he hoped that he had not been too abrupt with the waiter, “poor cuss.”  But he lay awake to think of Theresa’s hair and hand-clasp; of polished desks and florid gentlemen who curtly summoned bank-presidents and who had—­he tossed the bedclothes about in his struggle to get the word—­who had a punch!

He would do that Great Traveling of his in the land of Big Business!

The five thousand princes of New York to protect themselves against the four million ungrateful slaves had devised the sacred symbols of dress-coats, large houses, and automobiles as the outward and visible signs of the virtue of making money, to lure rebels into respectability and teach them the social value of getting a dollar away from that inhuman, socially injurious fiend, Some One Else.  That Our Mr. Wrenn should dream for dreaming’s sake was catastrophic; he might do things because he wanted to, not because they were fashionable; whereupon, police forces and the clergy would disband, Wall Street and Fifth Avenue would go thundering down.  Hence, for him were provided those Y. M. C. A. night bookkeeping classes administered by solemn earnest men of thirty for solemn credulous youths of twenty-nine; those sermons on content; articles on “building up the rundown store by live advertising”; Kiplingesque stories about playing the game; and correspondence-school advertisements that shrieked, “Mount the ladder to thorough knowledge—­the path to power and to the fuller pay-envelope.”

To all these Mr. Wrenn had been indifferent, for they showed no imagination.  But when he saw Big Business glorified by a humorous melodrama, then The Job appeared to him as picaresque adventure, and he was in peril of his imagination.

The eight-o’clock sun, which usually found a wildly shaving Mr. Wrenn, discovered him dreaming that he was the manager of the Souvenir Company.  But that was a complete misunderstanding of the case.  The manager of the Souvenir Company was Mr. Mortimer R. Guilfogle, and he called Mr. Wrenn in to acquaint him with that fact when the new magnate started his career in Big Business by arriving at the office one hour late.