She raised an argumentative finger toward him, as if he had sought to contest this.

“I’ve always—­” he began weakly.  But the Demon would have none of it.

“Oh, don’t tell me what you’ve ‘always!’ I know well enough what you’ve ‘always.’  That isn’t the point.”

What did the woman think she was talking about?  Couldn’t he say a word to her without being snapped at?

“What is the point?” he ventured.  It was still the waiting game, and it showed he wasn’t afraid of her.

“The point is—­”

[Illustration:  In that instant Bean read the flapper’s look, the look she had puzzled him with from their first meeting]

And in that instant Bean read the flapper’s look, the look she had puzzled him with from their first meeting.  It was like finally understanding an oft-heard phrase in a foreign tongue.  How luminous that look was now!  The simple look of proud and assured and most determined ownership!  It lay quietly on her face now as always.  It was the look he must have bestowed on his shell the first time he saw it.  Ownership!

“—­the point is,” the Demon was saying terribly, “I don’t believe in long engagements.”

He had once been persuaded, yielding out of spineless bravado, to descend the shaft of a mine in a huge bucket.  The sensations of that plunge were now reproduced.  He looked up to the far circle of light that ever diminished as he went down and down.

“I don’t believe in them either,” said the flapper firmly.  “They’re perfectly no good.”

“I never did believe in ’em,” he heard himself saying.  And added with firmness equal to the flapper’s, “Silly!” He was wondering if they would ever pull him to the surface again; if the rope would break.

“Just what I think,” chanted the flapper.  “Silly, and then some!”

“Then some!” repeated the male being in helpless, terrified corroboration.

“Won’t he ever come?” queried the Demon.  “Oh, here he is!”

The waiter was neatly removing tea and things from the tray.  Bean recalled how on that other occasion he had fearfully believed the earth would close upon him, how hope revived as he was precariously drawn upward, and what a novel view the earth’s fair surface presented when he again stood firmly upon it.

It was the waiter who raised him from this other abyss where he had been like to perish, the waiter and the things, including tea:  plates, forks, napkins, cups and saucers, tea and hot water, jam, biscuit, toast.  There was something particularly reassuring about that plate of nicely matched triangles of buttered toast.  It spoke of a sane and orderly world where you were never taken off your feet.

“How many lumps?” demanded the pouring flapper.

“Just as you like; I’m not fussy,” he answered.

This was untrue.  His preference in the matter was decided, but he could not remember what it was.  Afterward he knew that he did not take sugar in his tea, but the flapper had sweetened it with three lumps.  Grandma again addressed him, engaging his difficult attention with a brandished fragment of toast.