In the street he chanted “four hundred thousand dollars” to himself.  He was one of the idle rich.  He hoped Cassidy would never hear of it.  Then, passing a steamship office, he recalled the horror that lay ahead of him.  Little old steamer.  But was a financier who had been netted four hundred thousand dollars to be put afloat upon the waters at the whim of a flapper?  She was going too far.  He’d better tell her so in plain words; say, “Look here, I’ve just netted four hundred thousand dollars, and no little old steamer for mine.  I don’t care much for the ocean.  We stay on land.  Better understand who’s who right at the start.”

That is what he would tell the flapper; make it clear to her.  She’d had her own way long enough.  Marriage was a serious business.  He was still resolving this when he turned into a shop.

“I want to get a steamer trunk—­sailing Wednesday,” he said in firm tones to the clerk.

* * * * *

It was midnight of Tuesday.  In the steam-heated apartment Bean paced the floor.  He was attired in the garments prescribed for gentlemen’s evening wear, and he was still pleasantly fretted by the excitement of having dined with the Breede family at the ponderous town house up east of the park.

He tried to recall in their order the events of those three days since he had left the office on Saturday.  His coolest efforts failed.  It was like watching a screen upon which many and diverse films were superimposing scenes in which he was an actor of more or less consequence, but in which his figure was always blurred.  It was confounding.

Yet he had certainly gone out to that country place Sunday for tea and things, taking Nap.  And the flapper, with a sinful pride, had shown him off to the family.  He and the flapper had clearly been of more consequence than the big sister and the affianced waster, who wouldn’t be able to earn his own cigarettes, say nothing of his ties and gloves.  Sister and the waster, who seemed to be an agreeable young man, were simply engaged in a prosaic way, and looked prosaically forward to a church wedding.  No one thought anything about them, and sister was indeed made perfectly furious by the airs the flapper put on.

Mrs. Breede, from one of the very oldest families of Omaha, had displayed amazing fortitude.  She had not broken down once, although she plainly regarded Bean as a malignant and fatal disease with which her latest-born had been infected.  “I must be brave, brave!” she had seemed to be reminding herself.  And when Nap had chased and chewed her toy spaniel, named “Rex,” until it seemed that Rex might pass on, she had summoned all her woman’s resignation and only murmured, “Nothing can matter now!”

There had seemed to be one fleeting epoch which he shared alone with the flapper, feeling the smooth yielding of her cheek and expanding under her very proudest gaze of ownership.  And a little more about fumed oak panels and the patent laundry tubs.