Bean considered that this was sheer flirting, whereupon he flung principle to the winds and flirted himself.

“You show signs of life,” declared Grandma, who was quick to note this changed demeanor.  And Bean smirked like a man of the world.

“She never set her mind on anything yet that she didn’t get it,” added Grandma, naming no one.  “She’s like her father there.”

And Bean strolled off to enjoy a vision of himself defeating her purpose to ensnare the Hollins youth.  Once he would have considered it crass presumption, but that was before a certain sarcophagus on the left bank of the Nile had been looted of its imperial occupant.  Now he merely recalled a story about a King Cophetua and a beggar maid.  It was a comparison that would have intensely interested the flapper’s mother, who was this time regarding Bean through her glazed weapon as if he were some queer growth the head gardener had brought from the conservatory.

Grandma deftly probed his past for affairs of the heart.  She pointedly had him alone, and her intimation was that he might talk freely, as to a woman of understanding and broad sympathy.  But Bean made a wretched mess of it.

Certainly there had been “affairs.”  There was the girl in Chicago, two doors down the street, whom he had once taken to walk in the park, but only once, because she talked; the girl in the business college who had pretty hair and always smiled when she looked at him; and another who, he was almost sure, had sent him an outspoken valentine; yes, there had been plenty of girls, but he hadn’t bothered much about them.

And Grandma, plainly incredulous, averred that he was too deep for her.  Bean was on the point of inventing a close acquaintance with an actress, which he considered would be scandalous enough to compel a certain respect he seemed to find lacking in the old lady, but he saw quickly that she would confuse and trip him with a few questions.  He was obliged to content himself with looking the least bit smug when she said: 

“You’re a deep one—­too deep for me!”

He tried hard to look deep and at least as depraved as the conventions of good society seemed to demand.

He was beginning to enjoy the sinful thing.  The girl was of course plighted to the Hollins boy, and yet she was putting herself in his way.  Very well!  He would teach her the danger of playing with fire.  He would bring all of his arts and wiles to bear.  True, in behaving thus he was conscious of falling below the moral standards of a wise and good king who had never stooped to baseness of any sort.  But he was now living in a different age, and somehow—­

“I’m a dual nature,” he thought.  And he applied to himself another phrase he seemed to recall from his reading of magazine stories.

“I’ve got the artistic temper!” This, he gathered, was held to explain, if not to justify, many departures from the conventional in affairs of the heart.  It was a kind of licensed madness.  Endowed with the “artistic temper,” you were not held accountable when you did things that made plain people gasp.  That was it!  That was why he was carrying on with Tommy Hollins’ girl, and not caring what happened.