“Hum!” said the old lady, looking as if he could tell a lot more if he chose.

She gripped one of his biceps.  He was not ashamed of these.  The night and morning drill with that home exerciser had told, even though he was not yet so impressive as the machine’s inventor, who, in magazine advertisements, looked down so fondly upon his own flexed arm.

“For goodness’ sake!” exclaimed the Demon respectfully.

Bean thrilled at this, feeling like a primitive brute of the cave times, accustomed to subduing women by force.

After that they seemed tacitly to agree that they would pretend to show him over the “grounds.”  Bean hated the grounds, which were worried to the last square inch into a chilling formality, and the big glass conservatory was stifling, like an overcrowded, overheated auditorium.  And he knew they were “drawing him out.”  They looked meaningly at each other whenever he spoke.

They questioned him about his early life, but learned only that his father had been “engaged in the express business.”  He was ably reticent.

Did he believe that women ought to be classed legally with drunkards, imbeciles and criminals?  He did not, if you came down to that.  Let them vote if they wanted to.  He had other things to think about, more important.  He didn’t care much, either way.  Voting didn’t do any good.

He had taken the ideal attitude to enrage the woman suffragist.  She will respect opposition.  Careless indifference she cannot brook.  Grandma opened upon him and battered him to a pulpy mass.  Within the half hour he was supinely promising to remind her to give him a badge before he left; and there was further talk of his marching at the next parade as a member of the Men’s League for Woman’s Suffrage, or, at the very least, in the column of Men Sympathizers.

He wondered, wondered!  Were they trying to assure themselves that he was a fit man to be in the employ of old Breede?  He could imagine it of them; as soon as they thought about voting they began to interfere in a man’s business.  Yet this suspicion slept when he was with the flapper alone.  Sometimes he was conscious of liking very much to be with her.  He decided that this was because she didn’t talk.

The evening of his last day came.  Breede, in a burst of garrulity, had said:  “Had enough this; go town to-morrow!” The flapper, and even the Demon, had seemed to be stirred by the announcement.  He resolved to be more than ever on his guard.  But they caught him fairly in the open.

“How do you like his hair parted that way in the middle?” demanded the flapper, with the calculating eye of one who ponders changes in a dwelling-house.

“U-u-mm!” considered the Demon gravely.  “Not bad.  Still, perhaps—!”

“Exactly what I was thinking!” said the flapper cordially.  Then, to Bean, her tone slightly raised: 

“Which way?”

“Got to get off a bunch of telegrams,” lied Bean.