“Gentlemen:—­Our Mr. Wrenn has again (underline that `again,’ Miss Blaustein), again looked up your order for May Day novelties.  As we wrote before, order certainly was duplicated by ’phone.  Our Mr. Wrenn is thoroughly reliable, and we have his records of these two orders.  We shall therefore have to push collection on both—­”

After all, Mr. Wrenn was thinking, the crafty manager might be merely concealing his hand.  Perhaps he had understood the defiance.  That gladdened him till after lunch.  But at three, when his head was again foggy with work and he had forgotten whether there was still April anywhere, he began to dread what the manager might do to him.  Suppose he lost his job; The Job!  He worked unnecessarily late, hoping that the manager would learn of it.  As he wavered home, drunk with weariness, his fear of losing The Job was almost equal to his desire to resign from The Job.

He had worked so late that when he awoke on Sunday morning he was still in a whirl of figures.  As he went out to his breakfast of coffee and whisked wheat at the Hustler Lunch the lines between the blocks of the cement walk, radiant in a white flare of sunshine, irritatingly recalled the cross-lines of order-lists, with the narrow cement blocks at the curb standing for unfilled column-headings.  Even the ridges of the Hustler Lunch’s imitation steel ceiling, running in parallel lines, jeered down at him that he was a prosaic man whose path was a ruler.

He went clear up to the branch post-office after breakfast to get the Sunday mail, but the mail was a disappointment.  He was awaiting a wonderful fully illustrated guide to the Land of the Midnight Sun, a suggestion of possible and coyly improbable trips, whereas he got only a letter from his oldest acquaintance—­Cousin John, of Parthenon, New York, the boy-who-comes-to-play of Mr. Wrenn’s back-yard days in Parthenon.  Without opening the letter Mr. Wrenn tucked it into his inside coat pocket, threw away his toothpick, and turned to Sunday wayfaring.

He jogged down Twenty-third Street to the North River ferries afoot.  Trolleys took money, and of course one saves up for future great traveling.  Over him the April clouds were fetterless vagabonds whose gaiety made him shrug with excitement and take a curb with a frisk as gambolsome as a Central Park lamb.  There was no hint of sales-lists in the clouds, at least.  And with them Mr. Wrenn’s soul swept along, while his half-soled Cum-Fee-Best $3.80 shoes were ambling past warehouses.  Only once did he condescend to being really on Twenty-third Street.  At the Ninth Avenue corner, under the grimy Elevated, he sighted two blocks down to the General Theological Seminary’s brick Gothic and found in a pointed doorway suggestions of alien beauty.