That night Wrenn worked till eight.
After his raise he could afford to go to the theater, since he was not saving money for travel. He wrote small letters to Istra and read the books he believed she would approve—a Paris Baedeker and the second volume of Tolstoi’s War and Peace, which he bought at a second-hand book-stall for five cents. He became interested in popular and inaccurate French and English histories, and secreted any amount of footnote anecdotes about Guy Fawkes and rush-lights and the divine right of kings. He thought almost every night about making friends, which he intended—just as much as ever—to do as soon as Sometime arrived.
On the day on which one of the Southern merchants wrote him about his son—“fine young fellow, sir—has every chance of rising to a lieutenancy on the Atlanta police force”—Mr. Wrenn’s eyes were moist. Here was a friend already. Sure. He would make friends. Then there was the cripple with the Capitol Corner News and Souvenir Stand in Austin, Texas. Mr. Wrenn secreted two extra Dixieland Ink-wells and a Yale football banner and sent them to the cripple for his brothers, who were in the Agricultural College.
The orders—yes, they were growing larger. The Southern salesmen took him out to dinner sometimes. But he was shy of them. They were so knowing and had so many smoking-room stories. He still had not found the friends he desired.
Miggleton’s restaurant, on Forty-second Street, was a romantic discovery. Though it had “popular prices”—plain omelet, fifteen cents—it had red and green bracket lights, mission-style tables, and music played by a sparrowlike pianist and a violinist. Mr. Wrenn never really heard the music, but while it was quavering he had a happier appreciation of the Silk-Hat-Harry humorous pictures in the Journal, which he always propped up against an oil-cruet. [That never caused him inconvenience; he had no convictions in regard to salads.] He would drop the paper to look out of the window at the Lazydays Improvement Company’s electric sign, showing gardens of paradise on the instalment plan, and dream of—well, he hadn’t the slightest idea what—something distant and deliciously likely to become intimate. Once or twice he knew that he was visioning the girl in soft brown whom he would “go home to,” and who, in a Lazydays suburban residence, would play just such music for him and the friends who lived near by. She would be as clever as Istra, but “oh, more so’s you can go regular places with her.”… Often he got good ideas about letters South, to be jotted down on envelope backs, from that music.
At last comes the historic match-box incident.
On that October evening in 1910 he dined early at Miggleton’s. The thirty-cent table d’hote was perfect. The cream-of-corn soup was, he went so far as to remark to the waitress, “simply slick”; the Waldorf salad had two whole walnuts in his portion alone.
The fat man with the white waistcoat, whom he had often noted as dining in this same corner of the restaurant, smiled at him and said “Pleasant evening” as he sat down opposite Mr. Wrenn and smoothed the two sleek bangs which decorated the front of his nearly bald head.
The music included a “potpourri of airs from ‘The Merry Widow,’” which set his foot tapping. All the while he was conscious that he’d made the Seattle Novelty and Stationery Corner Store come through with a five-hundred-dollar order on one of his letters.
The Journal contained an editorial essay on “Friendship” which would have been, and was, a credit to Cicero.