a Chinaman. Mr. Wrenn was really seeing, not cow-punchers and
sage-brush, but himself, defying the office manager's surliness
and revolting against the ticket-man's rudeness. Now he was
ready for the nearly overpowering delight of travel-pictures.
He bounced slightly as a Gaumont film presented Java.

He was a connoisseur of travel-pictures, for all his life he had
been planning a great journey. Though he had done Staten Island
and patronized an excursion to Bound Brook, neither of these was
his grand tour. It was yet to be taken. In Mr. Wrenn,
apparently fastened to New York like a domestic-minded barnacle,
lay the possibilities of heroic roaming. He knew it. He, too,
like the man who had taken the Gaumont pictures, would saunter
among dusky Javan natives in "markets with tiles on the roofs
and temples and--and--uh, well--places!" The scent of Oriental
spices was in his broadened nostrils as he scampered out of the
Nickelorion, without a look at the ticket-taker, and headed for
"home"--for his third-floor-front on West Sixteenth Street.
He wanted to prowl through his collection of steamship brochures
for a description of Java. But, of course, when one's landlady
has both the sciatica and a case of Patient Suffering one stops
in the basement dining-room to inquire how she is.

Mrs. Zapp was a fat landlady. When she sat down there was
a straight line from her chin to her knees. She was usually
sitting down. When she moved she groaned, and her apparel creaked.
She groaned and creaked from bed to breakfast, and ate five
griddle-cakes, two helpin's of scrapple, an egg, some rump steak,
and three cups of coffee, slowly and resentfully. She creaked
and groaned from breakfast to her rocking-chair, and sat about