At four-thirty the day’s work ended and Bean was free to forget until another day the little he had been unable to avoid learning about high railroad finance; free to lead his own secret life, which was a thing apart from all that wordy foolery.

He changed from his office coat to one alleged by its maker to give him the appearance of perfect physical development, and descended to the street-level in company with Bulger.  Bean would have preferred to walk down; he suffered the sensations of dying each time the elevator seemed to fall, but he could not confess this to the doggish and intrepid Bulger.

There were other weaknesses he had to cloak.  Bulger proffered cigarettes from a silver case at their first meeting.  Bean declined.

“Doctor’s orders,” said he.

“Nerves?” suggested Bulger, expertly.

“Heart—­gets me something fierce.”

“Come in here to Tommy’s and take a bracer,” now suggested the hospitable Bulger.  But again the physician had been obdurate.

“Won’t let me touch a thing—­liver,” said Bean.  “Got to be careful of a breakdown.”

“Tough,” said Bulger.  “Man needs a certain amount of it, down here in the street.  Course, a guy can’t sop it up, like you see some do.  Other night, now—­gang of us out, y’understand—­come too fast for your Uncle Cuthbert.  Say, goin’ up those stairs where I live I cert’n’ly must ‘a’ sounded like a well-known clubman gettin’ home from an Elks’ banquet.  Head, next A.M.?—­ask me, ask me!  Nothing of the kind!  Don’t I show up with a toothache and con old Tully into a day off at the dentist’s to have the bridge-work tooled up.  Ask me was I at the dentist’s?  Wow!  Not!—­little old William J. Turkish bath for mine!”

Bean was moved to raw envy.  But he knew himself too well.  The specialist he professed to have consulted had put a ban upon the simplest recreations.  Otherwise how could he with any grace have declined those repeated invitations of Bulger’s to come along and meet a couple of swell dames that’d like to have a good time?  Bulger, considered in relation to the sex not his own, was what he himself would have termed “a smooth little piece of work.”  Bean was not this.  Of all his terrors women, as objects of purely male attention, were the greatest.  He longed for them, he looked upon such as were desirable with what he believed to be an evil eye, but he had learned not to go too close.  They talked, they disconcerted him horribly.  And if they didn’t talk they looked dangerous, as if they knew too much.  Some day, of course, he would nerve himself to it.  Indeed he very determinedly meant to marry, and to have a son who should be trained from the cradle with the sole idea of making him a great left-handed pitcher; but that was far in the future.  He longed tragically to go with Bulger and meet a couple of swell dames, but he knew how it would be.  Right off they would find him out and laugh at him.