A certain insignificant Bunker Bean was not like this.  With a soul aspiring to stripes and checks that should make him a man to be looked at twice in a city street, he lacked courage for any but the quietest patterns.  Longing for the cravat of brilliant hue, he ate out his heart under neutral tints.  Had he not, in the intoxication of his first free afternoon in New York, boldly purchased a glorious thing of silk entirely, flatly red, an article to stamp its wearer with distinction; and had he not, in the seclusion of his rented room, that night hidden the flaming thing at the bottom of a bottom drawer, knowing in his sickened soul he dared not flaunt it?

Once, truly, had he worn it, but only for a brief stroll on a rainy Sunday, with an entirely opaque raincoat buttoned closely under his chin.  Even so, he fancied that people stared through and through that guaranteed fabric straight to his red secret.  The rag burned on his breast.  Afterward it was something to look at beyond the locked door; perhaps to try on behind drawn shades, late of a night.  And how little Gordon Dane would have made of such a matter!  Floated in Bean’s mind the refrain of a clothing advertisement.  “The more advanced dressers will seek this fashion.”  “Something dignified yet different!” Gordon Dane would be “an advanced dresser.”

But if you have been afraid of nearly everything nearly all your life, how then?  You must be “dignified” only.  The brave only may be “different.”  It was all well enough to gaze at striking fabrics in windows; but to buy and to wear openly, and get yourself pointed at—­laughed at!  Again sounded the refrain of the hired bard of dress. “It is cut to give the wearer the appearance of perfect physical development.  And the effect so produced so improves his form that he unconsciously strives to attain the appearance which the garment gives him; he expands his chest, draws in his waist and stands erect.”

A rustling of papers from the opposite side of the desk promised a diversion of his thoughts.  Bean was a hireling and the person who rustled the papers was his master, but the youth bestowed upon the great man a look of profound, albeit not unkindly, contempt.  It could be seen, even as he sat in the desk-chair, that he was a short man; not an inch better than Bean, there.  He was old.  Bean, when he thought of the matter, was satisfied to guess him as something between fifty and eighty.  He didn’t know and didn’t care how many might be the years of little Jim Breede.  Breede was the most negligible person he knew.

He was nearly nothing, in Bean’s view, if you came right down to it.  Besides being of too few inches for a man and unspeakably old, he was unsightly.  Nothing of the Gordon Dane about Breede.  The little hair left him was an atrocious foggy gray; never in order, never combed, Bean thought.  The brows were heavy, and still curiously dark, which made them look threatening.  The eyes were the coldest of