Monday there had been a mere look-in at the office, with Tully saying “Sir”; with Breede exploding fragments of words to a middle-aged and severely gowned woman stenographer who was more formidable than a panorama of the Swiss Alps, and who plainly made Breede uncomfortable; and with Bulger saying, “Never fooled your Uncle Cuthbert for a minute.  Did little old George W. Wisenham have you doped out right or not?  Ask me, ask me; wake me up any time in the night and ask me!”

Tuesday afternoon he had walked with the flapper in the park and had learned of many things going forward with solely his welfare in view—­little old house surrounded on all sides by just perfectly scenery—­little old next year’s car—­little old going-away rag—­little old perfectly just knew it the first moment she saw him—­little old new rags to be bought in Paris—­and sister only going to Asheville on hers.

And the dinner in town, where he had seemed to make an excellent impression, only that Mrs. Breede persisted in behaving as if the body was still upstairs and she must be brave, brave!  And Grandma, the Demon, confiding to him over her after-dinner cigarette that he was in for it now, though she hadn’t dared tell him so before; but he’d find that out for himself soon enough if he wasn’t very careful about thwarting her.  It made her perfectly furious to be thwarted.

Nor did he fail to note that the stricken mother was distinctly blaming the Demon for the whole dreadful affair.  Her child had been allowed to associate with a grandmother who had gone radical at an age when most of her sex simmer in a gentle fireside conservatism and die respectably.  But it was too late now.  She could only be brave, brave!

And he was to be there at nine sharp, which was too early, but the flapper could be sure only after he came that nothing had happened to him, that he had neither failed in business, been poisoned by some article of food not on her list, nor diverted by that possible Other One who seemed always to lurk in the flapper’s mental purlieus.  She just perfectly wanted him there an hour too early; all there was about it!

These events had beaten upon him with the unhurried but telling impact of an ocean tide.  Two facts were salient from the mass:  whatever he had done he had done because of Ram-tah; and he was going to Paris, where he would see the actual tomb of that other outworn shell of his.

He thought he would not be able to sleep.  He had the night in which to pack that steamer trunk.  Leisurely he doffed the faultless evening garments—­he was going to have a waistcoat pointed like the waster’s, with four of those little shiny buttons, and studs and cuff-links to match—­and donned a gayly flowered silk robe.

With extreme discomfort he surveyed the new steamer trunk.  Merely looking at a steamer trunk left him with acute premonitions of what the voyage had in store for him.  But the flapper was the flapper; and it was the only way ever to see that tomb.