Bean grew to college years.  Aunt Clara had been insistent about the college; it was to be the best business college in Chicago.  Bean matriculated without formality and studied stenography and typewriting.  Aunt Clara had been afraid that he might “get in” with a fast college set and learn to drink and smoke and gamble.  It may be admitted that he wished to do just these things, but he had observed the effects of drink, his one experience with tobacco remained all too vivid, and gambling required more capital than the car fare he was usually provided with.  Besides, you came to a bad end if you gambled.  It led to other things.

Nor would he, on the public street, join with any number of his class in the college yell.  He was afraid a policeman would arrest him.  Even in the more mature years of a comparatively blameless life he remained afraid of policemen, and never passed one without a tremor.  All of which conduced to his efficiency as a student.  When others fled to their questionable pleasures he was as likely as not to remain in his chair before a typewriter, pounding out again and again, “The swift brown fox jumps over the lazy dog—­” a dramatic enough situation ingeniously worded to utilize nearly all the letters of our alphabet.

At last he was pronounced competent, received a diploma (which Aunt Clara framed handsomely and hung in her own room beside the pastel portrait of Boo’ful in his opulent prime) and took up a man’s work.

* * * * *

The veil that hangs between mortal eyes and the Infinite had many times been pierced for him by the able Mrs. Jackson.  He was now to enter another and more significant stage of his spiritual development.

His first employer was a noble-looking old man, white-bearded, and vast of brow, who came to be a boarder at Aunt Clara’s.  He was a believer in the cult of theosophy and specialized on reincarnation.  Neither word was luminous to Bean, but he learned that the old gentleman was writing a book and would need an amanuensis.  They agreed upon terms and the work began.  The book was a romance entitled, “Glimpses Through the Veil of Time,” and it was to tell of a soul’s adventures through a prolonged series of reincarnations.  So much Bean grasped.  The terminology of the author was more difficult.  When you have chiefly learned to write, “Your favour of the 11th inst. came duly to hand and in reply we beg to state—­” it is confusing to be switched to such words as “anthropogenesis” and to chapter headings like “Substituting Variable Quantities for Fixed Extraordinary Theoretic Possibilities.”  Even when the author meant to be most lucid Bean found him not too easy.  “In order to simplify the theory of the Karmic cycle,” dictated the white-bearded one for his Introduction, “let us think of the subplanes of the astral plane as horizontal divisions, and of the types of matter belonging to the seven great planetary Logoi as perpendicular divisions crossing these others at right angles.”