“Oh, I don’t know about that, Charley. 

 “Charley was making up for some uncertainty as to his own logic by beaming persuasiveness, and Mr. Wrenn was afraid of being hypnotized. “No, no!” he throbbed, rising. 

 “Well, all right!” snarled Charley, “if you like to be Gogie’s goat…. Oh, you’re all right, Wrennski. I suppose you had ought to stay, if you feel you got to…. Well, so long. I’ve got to beat it over and buy a pair of socks before I go back.” 

 Mr. Wrenn crept out of Drubel’s behind him, very melancholy. Even Charley admitted that he “had ought to stay,” then; and what chance was there of persuading the dread Mr. Mortimer R. Guilfogle that he wished to be looked upon as one resigning? Where, then, any chance of globe-trotting; perhaps for months he would remain in slavery, and he had hoped just that morning— One dreadful quarter-hour with Mr. Guilfogle and he might be free. He grinned to himself as he admitted that this was like seeing Europe after merely swimming the mid-winter Atlantic. 

 Well, he had nine minutes more, by his two-dollar watch; nine minutes of vagabondage. He gazed across at a Greek restaurant with signs in real Greek letters like “ruins at—well, at Aythens.” A Chinese chop-suey den with a red-and-yellow carved dragon, and at an upper window a squat Chinaman who might easily be carrying a kris, “or whatever them Chink knives are,” as he observed for the hundredth time he had taken this journey. A rotisserie, before whose upright fender of scarlet coals whole ducks were happily roasting to a shiny brown. In a furrier’s window were Siberian foxes’ skins (Siberia! huts of “awful brave convicks”; the steely Northern Sea; guards in blouses, just as he’d seen them at an Academy of Music play) and a polar bear (meaning, to him, the Northern Lights, the long hike, and the igloo at night). And the florists! There were orchids that (though he only half knew it, and that all inarticulately) whispered to him of jungles where, in the hot hush, he saw the slumbering python and—“What was it in that poem, that, Mandalay, thing? was it about jungles? Anyway: 

 “‘Them garlicky smells, And the sunshine and the palms and the bells.’” 

 He had to hurry back to the office. He stopped only to pat the head of a florist’s delivery horse that looked wistfully at him from the curb. “Poor old fella. What you thinking about? Want to be a circus horse and wander? Le’s beat it together. You can’t, eh? Poor old fella!” 

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