Bean controlled himself and went to his desk.

“‘Mr.’ and ‘Sir’!  Gee!  Am I as rich as that??” he thought.

Half an hour later it no longer seemed to him that he was rich at all.  He was seated opposite Breede taking letters in shorthand as if he were merely a thirty-dollar-a-week Bunker Bean.  Breede was refusing to recognize any change in their relationship.  He made no reference to their talk of the day before and his detached cuffs stubbornly occupied their old position on the desk.  Was it all a dream—­and the flapper, too?

But the flapper soon called him to the telephone.

“Poor old Pops came home late, and he says you’re just perfectly a puzzle to him,” she began.

“I know,” said Bean; “he says he can’t make me out.”

“And Moms began to say the silliest things about you, until I just had to take her seriously, so I perfectly told her that woman had come into her own in this generation, thanks to a few noble leaders of our sex—­it’s in Granny’s last speech at the league—­and that sent her up in the air.  I don’t think she can be as well as she used to be; and I told Pops he had to give me some money, and he said he knew it as well as I did, so what was the use of talking about it, and so he just perfectly gave me fifty or sixty thousand dollars and told me to make it go as far as I could, but I don’t know, that grocer says the cost of living is going up every day because the Senate isn’t insurgent enough; and anyway I’ll get the tickets and a suite on that little old boat that sails Wednesday.  I thought you’d want a day or two; and everything will be very quiet, only the family present, coming into town for it, you know, Wednesday morning, and the boat sails at noon, and I’ll be so perfectly glad when it’s all over because it’s a very serious step for a young girl to take.  Granny herself says it should never be taken lightly, unless you just perfectly know, but of course we do, don’t we?  I think you’ll like fumed oak better, after all—­and poor old Pops saying you’re such a puzzle to him.  He says he can’t make out just how many kinds of a perfectly swear-word fool you are, but I can, and that’s just deliciously enough for anybody.  And you’re to come out to-morrow and have tea and things in the afternoon, and I’m going to be before sister is, after all.  She’s perfectly furious about it and says I ought to be put back into short skirts, but I just perfectly knew it the very first time I ever looked at you.  Stay around there, in case I think of something I’ve forgotten.  G’bye.”

Wednesday—­a little old steamer sailing at noon!  A steamer, and he couldn’t swim a stroke and was always terrified by water.  And the trip West with the home team!  What about that?  Why had he not the presence of mind to cut in and just perfectly tell her where they were going?  But he had let the moment pass.  It was too late.  He didn’t want to begin by making a row.  And Breede was puzzled by him that way, was he?  Couldn’t make out how many kinds of perfectly swear-word fool he was?