On the plain kitchen-ware table was spread a cloth of Reseda green, like a dull old leaf in color.  On it lay a gold-mounted fountain-pen, huge and stub-pointed; a medley of papers and torn envelopes, a bottle of Creme Yvette, and a silver-framed portrait of a lean smiling man with a single eye-glass.

Mr. Wrenn did not really see all these details, but he had an impression of luxury and high artistic success.  He considered the Yvette flask the largest bottle of perfume he’d ever seen; and remarked that there was “some guy’s picture on the table.”  He had but a moment to reconnoiter, for she was astonishingly saying: 

“So you were lonely when I knocked?”

“Why, how—­”

“Oh, I could see it.  We all get lonely, don’t we?  I do, of course.  Just now I’m getting sorer and sorer on Interesting People.  I think I’ll go back to Paris.  There even the Interesting People are—­why, they’re interesting.  Savvy—­you see I am an American—­savvy?”

“Why—­uh—­uh—­uh—­I d-don’t exactly get what you mean.  How do you mean about `Interesting People’?”

“My dear child, of course you don’t get me.”  She went to the mirror and patted her hair, then curled on the bed, with an offhand “Won’t you sit down?” and smoked elaborately, blowing the blue tendrils toward the ceiling as she continued:  “Of course you don’t get it.  You’re a nice sensible clerk who’ve had enough real work to do to keep you from being afraid that other people will think you’re commonplace.  You don’t have to coddle yourself into working enough to earn a living by talking about temperament.

“Why, these Interesting People—­You find ’em in London and New York and San Francisco just the same.  They’re convinced they’re the wisest people on earth.  There’s a few artists and a bum novelist or two always, and some social workers.  The particular bunch that it amuses me to hate just now—­and that I apparently can’t do without—­they gather around Olympia Johns, who makes a kind of salon out of her rooms on Great James Street, off Theobald’s Road....  They might just as well be in New York; but they’re even stodgier.  They don’t get sick of the game of being on intellectual heights as soon as New-Yorkers do.

“I’ll have to take you there.  It’s a cheery sensation, you know, to find a man who has some imagination, but who has been unspoiled by Interesting People, and take him to hear them wamble.  They sit around and growl and rush the growler—­I hope you know growler-rushing—­and rejoice that they’re free spirits.  Being Free, of course, they’re not allowed to go and play with nice people, for when a person is Free, you know, he is never free to be anything but Free.  That may seem confusing, but they understand it at Olympia’s.