The hero of the one-act play at Hammerstein’s Victoria vaudeville theater on that December evening was, it appeared, a wealthy young mine-owner in disguise. He was working for the “fake mine promoter” because he loved the promoter’s daughter with a love that passed all understanding except that of the girls in the gallery. When the postal authorities were about to arrest the promoter our young hero saved him by giving him a real mine, and the ensuing kiss of the daughter ended the suspense in which Mr. Wrenn and Nelly, Mrs. Arty and Tom had watched the play from the sixth row of the balcony.

Sighing happily, Nelly cried to the group: “Wasn’t that grand? I got so excited! Wasn’t that young miner a dear?”

“Awfully nice,” said Mr. Wrenn. “And, gee! wasn’t that great, that office scene — with that safe and the rest of the stuff — just like you was in a real office. But, say, they wouldn’t have a copying-press in an office like that; those fake mine promoters send out such swell letters; they’d use carbon copies and not muss the letters all up.”

“By gosh, that’s right!” and Tom nodded his chin toward his right shoulder in approval. Nelly cried, “That’s so; they would”; while Mrs. Arty, not knowing what a copying-press was, appeared highly commendatory, and said nothing at all.

During the moving pictures that followed, Mr. Wrenn felt proudly that he was taken seriously, though he had known them but little over a month. He followed up his conversational advantage by leading the chorus in wondering, “which one of them two actors the heroine was married to?” and “how much a week they get for acting in that thing?” It was Tom who invited them to Miggleton’s for coffee and fried oysters. Mr. Wrenn was silent for a while. But as they were stamping through the rivulets of wheel-tracks that crisscrossed on a slushy street-crossing Mr. Wrenn regained his advantage by crying, “Say, don’t you think that play ‘d have been better if the promoter ‘d had an awful grouch on the young miner and ‘d had to crawfish when the miner saved him?”

“Why, yes; it would!” Nelly glowed at him.

“Wouldn’t wonder if it would,” agreed Tom, kicking the December slush off his feet and patting Mr. Wrenn’s back.

“Well, look here,” said Mr. Wrenn, as they left Broadway, with its crowds betokening the approach of Christmas, and stamped to the quieter side of Forty-second, “why wouldn’t this make a slick play: say there’s an awfully rich old guy; say he’s a railway president or something, d’ you see? Well, he’s got a secretary there in the office — on the stage, see? The scene is his office. Well, this guy’s — the rich old guy’s — daughter comes in and says she’s married to a poor man and she won’t tell his name, but she wants some money from her dad. You see, her dad’s been planning for her to marry a marquise or some kind of a lord, and he’s sore as can be, and he won’t listen to her, and he just cusses her out something fierce, see? Course he doesn’t really cuss, but he’s awful sore; and she tells him didn’t he marry her mother when he was a poor young man; but he won’t listen. Then the secretary butts in — my idea is he’s been kind of keeping in the background, see — and he’s the daughter’s husband all the while, see? and he tells the old codger how he’s got some of his — some of the old fellow’s — papers that give it away how he done something that was crooked — some kind of deal — rebates and stuff, see how I mean? — and the secretary’s going to spring this stuff on the newspapers if the old man don’t come through and forgive them; so of course the president has to forgive them, see?”

“You mean the secretary was the daughter’s husband all along, and he heard what the president said right there?” Nelly panted, stopping outside Miggleton’s, in the light from the oyster-filled window.

“Yes; and he heard it all.”

“Why, I think that’s just a fine idea,” declared Nelly, as they entered the restaurant. Though her little manner of dignity and even restraint was evident as ever, she seemed keenly joyous over his genius.

“Say, that’s a corking idea for a play, Wrenn,” exclaimed Tom, at their table, gallantly removing the ladies’ wraps.

“It surely is,” agreed Mrs. Arty.

“Why don’t you write it?” asked Nelly.

“Aw — I couldn’t write it!”

“Why, sure you could, Bill,” insisted Tom. “Straight; you ought to write it. (Hey, waiter! Four fries and coffee!) You ought to write it. Why, it’s a wonder; it ‘d make a dev — ‘Scuse me, ladies. It’d make a howling hit. You might make a lot of money out of it.”

The renewed warmth of their wet feet on the red-tile floor, the scent of fried oysters, the din of “Any Little Girl” on the piano, these added color to this moment of Mr. Wrenn’s great resolve. The four stared at one another excitedly. Mr. Wrenn’s eyelids fluttered. Tom brought his hand down on the table with a soft flat “plob” and declared: “Say, there might be a lot of money in it. Why, I’ve heard that Harry Smith — writes the words for these musical comedies — makes a mint of money.”

“Mr. Poppins ought to help you in it — he’s seen such a lot of plays,” Mrs. Arty anxiously advised.

“That’s a good idea,” said Mr. Wrenn. It had, apparently, been ordained that he was to write it. They were now settling important details. So when Nelly cried, “I think it’s just a fine idea; I knew you had lots of imagination,” Tom interrupted her with:

“No; you write it, Bill. I’ll help you all I can, of course. . . . Tell you what you ought to do: get hold of Teddem — he’s had a lot of stage experience; he’d help you about seeing the managers. That ‘d be the hard part — you can write it, all right, but you’d have to get next to the guys on the inside, and Teddem — Say, you cer_tain_ly ought to write this thing, Bill. Might make a lot of money.”

“Oh, a lot!” breathed Nelly.

“Heard about a fellow,” continued Tom —” fellow named Gene Wolf, I think it was — that was so broke he was sleeping in Bryant Park, and he made a hundred thousand dollars on his first play — or, no; tell you how it was: he sold it outright for ten thousand — something like that, anyway. I got that right from a fellow that’s met him.”

“Still, an author’s got to go to college and stuff like that.” Mr. Wrenn spoke as though he would be pleased to have the objection overruled at once, which it was with a universal:

“Oh, rats!”

Crunching oysters in a brown jacket of flour, whose every lump was a crisp delight, hearing his genius lauded and himself called Bill thrice in a quarter-hour, Mr. Wrenn was beatified. He asked the waiter for some paper, and while the four hotly discussed things which “it would be slick to have the president’s daughter do” he drew up a list of characters on a sheet of paper he still keeps. It is headed, “Miggleton’s Forty-second Street Branch.” At the bottom appear numerous scribblings of the name Nelly.

{the full page is covered with doodling as well}

“I think I’ll call the heroine ‘Nelly,’” he mused.

Nelly Croubel blushed. Mrs. Arty and Tom glanced at each other. Mr. Wrenn realized that he had, even at this moment of social triumph, “made a break.”

He said, hastily; “I always liked that name. I— I had an aunt named that!”

“Oh —” started Nelly.

“She was fine to me when I was a kid, “Mr. Wrenn added, trying to remember whether it was right to lie when in such need.

“Oh, it’s a horrid name,” declared Nelly. “Why don’t you call her something nice, like Hazel — or — oh — Dolores.”

“Nope; Nelly’s an elegant name — an elegant name.”

He walked with Nelly behind the others, along Forty-second Street. To the outsider’s eye he was a small respectable clerk, slightly stooped, with a polite mustache and the dignity that comes from knowing well a narrow world; wearing an overcoat too light for winter; too busily edging out of the way of people and guiding the nice girl beside him into clear spaces by diffidently touching her elbow, too pettily busy to cast a glance out of the crowd and spy the passing poet or king, or the iron night sky. He was as undistinguishable a bit of the evening street life as any of the file of street-cars slashing through the wet snow. Yet, he was the chivalrous squire to the greatest lady of all his realm; he was a society author, and a man of great prospective wealth and power over mankind!

“Say, we’ll have the grandest dinner you ever saw if I get away with the play,” he was saying. “Will you come, Miss Nelly?”

“Indeed I will! Oh, you sha’n’t leave me out! Wasn’t I there when —”

“Indeed you were! Oh, we’ll have a reg’lar feast at the Astor — artichokes and truffles and all sorts of stuff. . . . Would — would you like it if I sold the play?”

“Course I would, silly!”

“I’d buy the business and make Rabin manager — the Souvenir Company.

So he came to relate all those intimacies of The Job; and he was overwhelmed at the ease with which she “got onto old Goglefogle.”

His preparations for writing the play were elaborate.

He paced Tom’s room till twelve-thirty, consulting as to whether he had to plan the stage-setting; smoking cigarettes in attitudes on chair arms. Next morning in the office he made numerous plans of the setting on waste half-sheets of paper. At noon he was telephoning at Tom regarding the question of whether there ought to be one desk or two on the stage.

He skipped the evening meal at Mrs. Arty’s, dining with literary pensiveness at the Armenian, for he had subtle problems to meditate. He bought a dollar fountain-pen, which had large gold-like bands and a rather scratchy pen-point, and a box of fairly large sheets of paper. Pressing his literary impedimenta tenderly under his arm, he attended four moving-picture and vaudeville theaters. By eleven he had seen three more one-act plays and a dramatic playlet.

He slipped by the parlor door at Mrs. Arty’s.

His room was quiet. The lamplight on the delicately green walls was like that of a regular author’s den, he was quite sure. He happily tested the fountain-pen by writing the names Nelly and William Wrenn on a bit of wrapping-paper (which he guiltily burned in an ash-tray); washed his face with water which he let run for a minute to cool; sat down before his table with a grunt of content; went back and washed his hands; fiercely threw off the bourgeois encumbrances of coat and collar; sat down again; got up to straighten a picture; picked up his pen; laid it down, and glowed as he thought of Nelly, slumbering there, near at hand, her exquisite cheek nestling silkenly against her arm, perhaps, and her white dreams —

Suddenly he roared at himself, “Get on the job there, will yuh?” He picked up the pen and wrote:
THE MILLIONAIRE’S DAUGHTER
A ONE ACT DRAMATIC PLAYLET
by
WILLIAM WRENN
CHARACTERS

John Warrington, a railway president; quite rich. Nelty Warrington, Mr. Warrington’s daughter. Reginald Thorne, his secretary.

He was jubilant. His pen whined at top speed, scattering a shower of tiny drops of ink.

Stage Scene: An office. Very expensive. Mr. Warrington and Mr. Thorne are sitting there. Miss Warrington comes in. She says:

He stopped. He thought. He held his head. He went over to the stationary bowl and soaked his hair with water. He lay on the bed and kicked his heels, slowly and gravely smoothing his mustache. Fifty minutes later he gave a portentous groan and went to bed.

He hadn’t been able to think of what Miss Warrington says beyond “I have come to tell you that I am married, papa,” and that didn’t sound just right; not for a first line it didn’t, anyway.

At dinner next night — Saturday — Tom was rather inclined to make references to “our author,” and to remark: “Well, I know where somebody was last night, but of course I won’t tell. Say, them authors are a wild lot.”

Mr. Wrenn, who had permitted the teasing of even Tim, the hatter, “wasn’t going to stand for no kidding from nobody — not when Nelly was there,” and he called for a glass of water with the air of a Harvard assistant professor forced to eat in a lunch-wagon and slapped on the back by the cook.

Nelly soothed him. “The play is going well, isn’t it?”

When he had, with a detached grandeur of which he was immediately ashamed, vouchsafed that he was already “getting right down to brass tacks on it,” that he had already investigated four more plays and begun the actual writing, every one looked awed and asked him assorted questions.

At nine-thirty that evening he combed and tightly brushed his hair, which he had been pawing angrily for an hour and a half, went down the hall to Nelly’s hall bedroom, and knocked with: “It’s Mr. Wrenn. May I ask you something about the play?”

“Just a moment,” he heard her say.

He waited, panting softly, his lips apart. This was to be the first time he had ever seen Nelly’s room. She opened the door part way, smiling shyly, timidly, holding her pale-blue dressing-gown close. The pale blueness was a modestly brilliant spot against the whiteness of the room — white bureau, hung with dance programs and a yellow Upton’s Grove High School banner, white tiny rocker, pale-yellow matting, white-and-silver wall-paper, and a glimpse of a white soft bed.

He was dizzy with the exaltation of that purity, but he got himself to say:

“I’m kind of stuck on the first part of the play, Miss Nelly. Please tell me how you think the heroine would speak to her dad. Would she call him ‘papa’ or ‘sir,’ do you think?”

“Why — let me see —”

“They’re such awful high society —”

“Yes, that’s so. Why, I should think she’d say ‘sir.’ Maybe oh, what was it I heard in a play at the Academy of Music? ‘Father, I have come back to you!’”

“Sa-a-ay, that’s a fine line! That’ll get the crowd going right from the first. . . . I told you you’d help me a lot.”

“I’m awfully glad if I have helped you,” she said, earnestly. Good night — and good, “awfully glad, but luck with the play. Good night.”

“Good night. Thank you a lot, Miss Nelly. Church in the morning, remember! Good night.”

“Good night.”

As it is well known that all playwrights labor with toy theaters before them for working models, Mr. Wrenn ran to earth a fine unbroken pasteboard box in which a ninety-eight-cent alarm-clock had recently arrived. He went out for some glue and three small corks. Setting up his box stage, he glued a pill-box and a match-box on the floor — the side of the box it had always been till now — and there he had the mahogany desks. He thrust three matches into the corks, and behold three graceful actors — graceful for corks, at least. There was fascination in having them enter, through holes punched in the back of the box, frisk up to their desks and deliver magic emotional speeches that would cause any audience to weep; speeches regarding which he knew everything but the words; a detail of which he was still quite ignorant after half an hour of playing with his marionettes.

Before he went despairingly to bed that Saturday night he had added to his manuscript:

Mr. Thorne says: Here are the papers, sir. As a great railway president you should —

The rest of that was to be filled in later. How the dickens could he let the public know how truly great his president was?

(Daughter, Miss Nelly, comes in.)

Miss Nelly: Father, I have come back to you, sir.

Mr. Warrington: My Daughter!

Nelly: Father, I have something to tell you; something —

Breakfast at Mrs. Arty’s was always an inspiration. In contrast to the lonely dingy meal at the Hustler Dairy Lunch of his Zapp days, he sat next to a trimly shirtwaisted Nelly, fresh and enthusiastic after nine hours’ sleep. So much for ordinary days. But Sunday morning — that was paradise! The oil-stove glowed and purred like a large tin pussy cat; it toasted their legs into dreamy comfort, while they methodically stuffed themselves with toast and waffles and coffee. Nelly and he always felt gently superior to Tom Poppins, who would be a-sleeping late, as they talked of the joy of not having to go to the office, of approaching Christmas, and of the superiority of Upton’s Grove and Parthenon.

This morning was to be Mr. Wrenn’s first attendance at church with Nelly. The previous time they had planned to go, Mr. Wrenn had spent Sunday morning in unreligious fervor at the Chelsea Dental Parlors with a young man in a white jacket instead of at church with Nelly.

This was also the first time that he had attended a church service in nine years, except for mass at St. Patrick’s, which he regarded not as church, but as beauty. He felt tremendously reformed, set upon new paths of virtue and achievement. H............