“Oh, yes!” gasped Bean.  “Yes, yes, yes, indeed!  She is that!”

VII

Bean had once attended a magician’s entertainment and there suffered vicariously the agony endured by one of his volunteer assistants.  Suavely the entertainer begged the help of “some kind gentleman from the audience.”  He was insistent, exerting upon the reluctant ones the pressure of his best platform manner.

When the pause had grown embarrassing, a shamed looking man slouched forward from an aisle seat amid hearty cheers.  He ascended the carpeted runway from aisle to stage, stumbled over footlights and dropped his hat.  Then the magician harried him to the malicious glee of the audience.  He removed playing-cards, white rabbits and articles of feminine apparel from beneath the coat of his victim.  He seated him in a chair that collapsed.  He gave him a box to hold and shocked him electrically.  He missed his watch and discovered it in the abused man’s pocket.  And when the ordeal was over the recovered hat was found to contain guinea-pigs.  The kind gentleman from the audience had been shown to be transcendently awkward, brainless, and to have a mania for petty thievery.  With burning face and falling glance, he had stumbled back to his seat, where a lady who had before exhibited the public manner of wife to husband toward him, now pretended that he was an utter and offensive stranger.

Bean, I say, had once suffered vicariously with this altruistic dolt.  His suffering now was not vicarious.  For three days he endured on the raw of his own soul tortures even more ingeniously harrowing.

To be shut up for three hours a day with Breede was bad enough, but custom had a little dulled his sensitiveness to this.  And he could look Breede over and write down in beautiful shorthand what he thought of him.

But the other Breedes!

Mrs. Breede, a member of one of the very oldest families in Omaha, he learned, terrified him exceedingly.  She was an advanced dresser—­he had to admit that—­but she was no longer beautiful.  She was a plucked rose that had been too long kept; the petals were rusting, crumpling at the edges.  He wondered if Breede had ever wished to be wrecked on a desert island with her.  She surveyed Bean through a glass-and-gold weapon with a long handle, and on the two subsequent occasions when she addressed him called him Mr. Brown.  Once meeting him in the hall, she seemed to believe that he had been sent to fix the telephone.

And the flapper’s taller sister of the languishing glance—­how quickly had she awakened him from that golden dream of the low-lying atoll and the wrecked ship in a far sea.  She did flirt with “any one,” no doubt about that.  She adroitly revealed to Bean an unshakable conviction that he was desperately enamoured of her, and that it served him right for a presumptuous nobody.  She talked to him, preened herself in his gaze, and