s, with their letters from mayors.
"But this here Wilfred Lennox had a new graft. He was the first I'd give
up to for mere poetry. He didn't have a single letter from a mayor, nor
even a picture card of himself standing with his hat off in front of
Pike's Peak--nothing but poetry. But, as I said, he was there with a
talk about pining for the open road and despising the cramped haunts of
men, and he had appealing eyes and all this flowing hair and necktie. So
I says to myself: 'All right, Wilfred, you win!' and put my purse back
in my bag and thought no more of it.
"Yet not so was it to be. Wilfred, working the best he could to make a
living doing nothing, pretty soon got to the office of Alonzo Price,
Choice Improved Real Estate and Price's Addition. Lon was out for the
moment, but who should be there waiting for him but his wife, Mrs.
Henrietta Templeton Price, recognized leader of our literary and
artistic set. Or I think they call it a 'group' or a 'coterie' or
something. Setting at Lon's desk she was, toying petulantly with horrid
old pens and blotters, and probably bestowing glances of disrelish from
time to time round the grimy office where her scrubby little husband
toiled his days away in unromantic squalor.
"I got to tell you about Henrietta. She's one of them like I just said
the harsh things about, with the secret cry in her heart for romance and
adventure and other forbidden things and with a kindly contempt for
peaceful Alonzo. She admits to being thirty-six, so you can figure it
out for yourself. Of course she gets her husband wrong at that, as women
so often do. Alonzo has probably the last pair of side whiskers outside
of a steel engraving and stands five feet two, weighing a hundred and
twenty-six pounds at the ring side, but he's game as a swordfish, and as
for being romantic in the true sense of the word--well, no one that ever
heard him sell a lot in Price's Addition--three miles and a half up on
the mesa, with only the smoke of the canning factory to tell a body they
was still near the busy haunts of men, that and a mile of concrete
sidewalk leading a life of complete idleness--I say no one that ever
listened to Lon sell a lot up there, pointing out on a blue print the
proposed site of the Carnegie Library, would accuse him of not being
romantic.
"But of course Henrietta never sees Lon's romance and he ain't always
had the greatest patience with hers--like the time she got up the Art
Loan Ex
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