“Yes, but, Charley, then if Guilfogle feels he can’t pay me that much—you know he’s responsible to the directors; he can’t do everything he wants to—why, he’ll just have to fire me, after I’ve talked to him like that, whether he wants to or not. And that’d leave us—that’d leave them—without a sales clerk, right in the busy season.”
“Why, sure, Wrenn; that’s what we want to do. If you go it ’d leave ’em without just about _two_ men. Bother ’em like the deuce. It ’d bother Mr. Mortimer X. Y. Guglefugle most of all, thank the Lord. He wouldn’t know where he was at—trying to break in a man right in the busy season. Here’s your chance. Come on, kid; don’t pass it up.”
“Oh gee, Charley, I can’t do that. You wouldn’t want me to try to _hurt_ the Souvenir Company after being there for—lemme see, it must be seven years.”
“Well, maybe you _like_ to get your cute little nose rubbed on the grindstone! I suppose you’d like to stay on at nineteen per for the rest of your life.”
“Aw, Charley, don’t get sore; please don’t! I’d like to get off, all right—like to go traveling, and stuff like that. Gee! I’d like to wander round. But I can’t cut out right in the bus—”
“But can’t you see, you poor nut, you won’t be _leaving_ ’em—they’ll either pay you what they ought to or lose you.”
“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.