You see, Mr. Wrenn didn’t know he was commonplace.
“After I left here last night I went over to Olympia Johns’, and she dragged me off to a play. I thought of you at it because there was an imaginative butler in it. You don’t mind my comparing you to a butler, do you? He was really quite the nicest person in the play, y’ know. Most of it was gorgeously rotten. It used to be a French farce, but they sent it to Sunday-school and gave it a nice fresh frock. It seemed that a gentleman-tabby had been trying to make a match between his nephew and his ward. The ward arted. Personally I think it was by tonsorial art. But, anyway, the uncle knew that nothing brings people together so well as hating the same person. You know, like hating the cousin, when you’re a kiddy, hating the cousin that always keeps her nails clean?”
“Yes! That’s so!”
“So he turned nasty, and of course the nephew and ward clinched till death did them part—which, I’m very sorry to have to tell you, death wasn’t decent enough to do on the stage. If the play could only have ended with everybody’s funeral I should have called it a real happy ending.”
Mr. Wrenn laughed gratefully, though uncertainly. He knew that she had made jokes for him, but he didn’t exactly know what they were.
“The imaginative butler, he was rather good. But the rest—Ugh!”
“That must have been a funny play,” he said, politely.
She looked at him sidewise and confided, “Will you do me a favor?”
“Oh yes, I—”
“Ever been married?”