“Rob you right and left,” mumbled Bean.  “All you can expect.”

“Just leave it all to me,” said the flapper with four of her double nods.  “They’ll soon learn better.”

“Hardly seems as if it could all be true,” ventured Bean in a genial effort at sanity.

“It’s just perfectly true and true,” insisted the flapper.  “I knew it all the time.”  She placed the old relentless gaze upon him.  He was hers.

“The beautiful, blind wants of youth!” said the Demon, who had been silent a long time, for her.  “I remember—­” But it seemed to come to nothing.  She was silent again.

He paid the waiter.

“It was just as well to have this little talk,” murmured Grandma as they arose.

The car throbbed before the steps.  They were in and away.  A reviving breeze swept them as the car gained speed.  At least it partially revived one of them.

In the back seat he presently found a hand in his, but his own hand seemed no longer a part of him.  He thought the serenity of the flapper was remarkable.  She seemed to feel that nothing wonderful had happened.  There was something awful about that calm.

* * * * *

The car stopped before the steam-heated apartment.  There were but brief adieus before it went on.  Cassidy sat at the head of his basement stairs with a Sunday paper.  He was reading an article entitled, “My Secrets of Beauty,” profusely illustrated.

“I wouldn’t have one o’ the things did ye give it t’ me,” said Cassidy.  “Runnin’ inta telegrapht poles an’ trolley cairs.”

“Couple of friends of mine took me out for a little spin,” said Bean, clutching his stick, his gloves and Nap’s leash.

He seemed to be still spinning.

In his own place he went quickly to Its closet, pulled open the door and shouted aloud: 

“Well, what do you make of that?”

The sound of his own voice was startling as he caught the look of the serene Ram-tah.  He softly closed the door upon what his living self had been.  He was too violent.

But he could not be cool all at once.  He tossed hat, stick, and gloves aside and paced the room.

Engaged to be married!  That was all any one could make of it.  All the agreeable iniquity had been extracted from the affair.  It was fearsomely respectable.  And it was deadly serious.  How had he got into it?  And yet he had always felt something ominous in that girl’s look.

And there would be a row “back there.”  Julia would make the row.  And Jim.  They might think Jim wouldn’t help in the row, but he knew better.  Jim was old Jim Breede, who would of course take Bunker Bean’s head off.  He had been a fool all the time.  In the car he had strained himself to the point of mentioning the Hollins boy.  The flapper had laughed unaffectedly.  Tommy Hollins was a perfectly darling boy, a good sport and all that, but he couldn’t be anything important to the flapper if he were the perfectly last man on earth.  How any one could ever have thought such an absurd thing was beyond the flapper, for one.