“Tut-tut-tut!  Really?  But that is from the Holy Scriptures, which should always be read in connection with Science and Health.”

“I must get it—­something in that.  Funny thing,” he added genially, “getting good stuff like that out of Hartford, Connecticut.”

He left Watkins or Adams staring after him in some bewilderment, a forgotten finger between the leaves of the Badaeker.

He began once more to lay a course through those puzzling streets.  He was going to that hotel.  He was going to be an upstart and talk to his own wife.

The tomb had cleared his brain.

“I’m no king,” he thought; “never was a king; more likely a guinea-pig.  But I’m some one now, all right!  I’ll show ’em; not afraid of the whole lot put together; face ’em all.”

He came out upon the river at last and presently found himself back in that circle of the hotel.  He stared a while at the bronze effigy surmounting that vainglorious column.  Then he drew a long breath and went into the hotel.

A capable Swiss youth responded to his demand to be shown to his room, seeming to consider it not strange that Americans in Paris should now and then return to their rooms.

At the doorway of a drawing-room that looked out upon the column the Swiss suggested coffee—­perhaps?

“And fruit and fumed ... boiled eggs and toast and all that meat and stuff,” supplemented Bean firmly.

He tried one of two doors that opened from the drawing-room and exposed a bedroom.  His, evidently.  There was the little old steamer trunk.  He discovered a bathroom adjoining and was presently suffering the celestial agonies of a cold bath with no waster to coerce him.

He dressed with indignant muttering, and with occasional glances out at that supreme upstart’s memorial.  He chose his suit of the most legible checks.  He had been a little fearful about it in New York.  It was rather advanced, even for one of that Wall Street gang that had netted himself four hundred thousand dollars.  Now he donned it intrepidly.

And, with no emotion whatever but a certain grim sureness of himself, he at last adjusted the entirely red cravat.  He gloated upon this flagrantly.  He hastily culled seven cravats of neutral tint and hurled them contemptuously into a waste-basket.  Done with that kind!

He heard a waiter in the drawing-room serving his breakfast.  He drew on a dark-lined waistcoat of white pique—­like the one worn by the oldest director the day Ram-tah had winked—­then the perfectly fitting coat of unmistakable checks, and went out to sit at the table.  He was resolving at the moment that he would do everything he had ever been afraid to do.  “’S only way show you’re not afraid,” he muttered.  He was wearing a cravat he had always feared to wear, and now he would devour meat things for breakfast, whatever the flapper thought about it.

When he had a little dulled the edge of his hunger, he rang a bell.