What more natural than that the freed soul, striving for another body, should have selected one of distinguished French ancestry?  The commoner would inevitably seek to become a patrician.

It was a big thing; a thing to dream and wonder and calculate about.  When he was puzzled or disturbed he would resort to the shell—­a thing he had clung tenaciously to through all the years—­sitting before it a long time, his eyes fixed upon it with hypnotic tensity.

What should it mean to him?  How was his life to be modified by it?  He did not doubt that changes would now ensue.  He was already bolder in the public eye.  If people stared superciliously at him, he sometimes stared back.  That aggressive stout man could not now have bullied him out of his seat in the car with any mere looks.

The phrase “Napoleon of Finance” had stayed in his mind.  Modernly the name seemed briefly to suggest some one who made a lot of money out of nothing but audacity.  Certainly it was not being applied to soldiers or statesmen.  This was interesting.  If he made a lot of money he could move to the country and have plenty of room for the dog.  And it seemed about the only field of adventure left for this peculiar genius.  He began to think about making money.  He knew vaguely how this was done:  you bought stocks and then waited for the melon to be cut.  You got on the inside of things.  You were found to have bought up securities that trebled in value over night.  Those that decreased in value had been bought by people who were not Napoleons.  That was the gist of it.  A Napoleonic mind would divine the way.  “Napoleon knew human nature like a book,” said one of the inspired historians.  That was all you needed to know.  He resolved to study human nature.

At precisely ten minutes past twelve on the following Saturday he laid upon old Metzeger’s desk the exact sum of five dollars and eighty-seven cents.  One less gifted as to human nature would have said, “Thank you!” and laid down five dollars and ninety cents.  Bean fell into neither trap.  Metzeger looked quickly at the clock and silently took the money.  He had become the prey of a man who surmised him accurately.

Then occurred one of those familiar tragedies of the wage slave.  The whole week long he had looked forward to the ball game.  In the box that afternoon would be the Greatest Pitcher the World Had Ever Known.  This figure had loomed in his mind that week bigger at times than all his past incarnations.  He was going to forego a sight of his dog in order to be early on the ground.  He would see the practice and thrill to the first line-up.  He had lived over and over that supreme moment when the umpire sweeps the plate with a stubby broom and adjusts his mask.

The correct coat was buttoned and the hat was being adjusted when the door of the inner office opened with a sharp rattle.

“Wantcha!” said Breede.

There was a fateful, trembling moment in which Breede was like to have been blasted; it was as if the magnate had wantonly affronted him who had once been the recipient of a second funeral in Paris.  Keeping Bean from a ball game aroused that one-time self of his as perhaps nothing else would have done.  But Breede was Breede, after all, and Bean swallowed the hot words that rose to his lips.  His perturbation was such, however, that Breede caught something of it.