The Chicago epoch began a year later.  The true nature of its causes never lay quite clearly in the mind of Bean.  There was, first, an entirely new Uncle Bunker whom he had never seen, but whom he at once liked very much.  He was a younger, more beautiful uncle, with a gay, light manner and expensive clothing.  He wore a magnificent gold watch and chain, and jewelled rings flashed from his white fingers as he, in absent moments, daintily passed a small pocket-comb through the meshes of his lustrous brown side-whiskers.  Little Bean knew that he did something on a board in Chicago; that he “operated” on the Board of Trade was the accustomed phrasing.  He liked the word, and tried to picture what “operating” might mean in relation to a board.

The good people of Wellsville regarded this uncle with quite all the respect so flashing a figure deserved.  Not so the two other Uncle Bunkers from over Walnut Shade way.  Their first known agreement, voiced of this financier, was in saying something wise about a fool and his money.

Later, and perhaps for the last time on earth, they agreed once more.  That was when the news of his marriage came to them—­for what was she?  Nothing but his landlady’s daughter!  Snip of a girl that helped her mother run a cheap Chicago boarding-house!  Him that could have taken his pick, if he was going to be a fool and tie himself up!  You could bet that the pair had “worked” him, that mother and the girl; landed him for his money, that was plain!  Well, he’d made his bed!

Bean was not slow to liken this uncle to his mother, who had also “made her bed.”  He had at first a misty notion that the bride might a little resemble his father, a notion happily dispelled when he saw her.  For the pair came to Wellsville.  It was a sort of honeymoon combined vaguely with business.  The bride was wonderfully pretty, Bean thought; dark and dainty and laughing, forever talking the most irresistible “baby-talk” to her adoring mate.  Her name for him was “Boo’ful.”

Bean at once fell deeply in love with this bride, a passion that was to endure beyond the life of most such affairs.  She professed an infatuation equal to his own, and regretted that an immediate marriage, which he timidly advocated in the course of their first interview, was not practicable.  That she was frivolous, light-minded, and would never settle down to be a good worker, was a village verdict he scorned.  Who would have her otherwise?  Not he, nor the adoring Boo’ful, it is certain.  He determined to go to live at her house, and, strangely enough—­for these sudden plans of his were most often discouraged—­the thing seemed feasible.  For one thing, his father was going to bring home a new mother; a lady, he gathered, who had not only settled down to be a good worker, but who, in espousing his father, would curiously not marry beneath her.  Without being told so, he had absorbed from his first mother a conviction that this was possible to but few women.  He felt a little glow of pride for his father in this affair.