Still, the flapper’s mind was set on an early marriage, and, for this once, at least, he would let her have her own way.  No good being brutal at the start.  They would get along; scrimp and save; even move to Brooklyn, maybe.  He looked into the far years and saw his son, greatest of all left-handed pitchers, shutting out Pittsburgh without a single hit.  A very aged couple in the grandstand tried to claim relationship with his pitching marvel, saying he was their grandson, but few of the yelling enthusiasts would credit it.  One of the crowd would later question the phenomenon’s father, who was none other than the owner of the home team, and he would say, “Oh, yes, quite true, but there has been no communication between the two families for more than twenty years.”

There would now follow from the abject grandparents timid overtures for a reconciliation, they having at last seen their mistake.  These overtures met with a varying response.  Sometimes he was adamant and told them no; they had made their bed twenty years before, and now they could lie on it.  Again, he would relent, allowing them to come to the house and associate with their superb descendant once every week.  He didn’t want to be too hard on them.

And he was not penniless.  He would continue in the unexciting express business for a while, until he had amassed enough to buy the ball-team.

Out at his typewriter, turning off Breede’s letters, his mind kept reverting to those nicely printed stock certificates Aunt Clara had sent to him, five of them for ten shares each, his own name written on them.  Of course there were hundreds of shares at the brokers’, but those seemed not to mean so much.  And they had gone down a point, whatever that was, since his purchase.  The broker had explained that this was because of an unexpectedly low dividend, 3 per cent.  It showed bad management.  All the more reason for getting a new man on the Board—­a lot of old fossils!

He recalled the indignant-looking old gentleman who was so excessively well dressed.  He wore choice gold-rimmed eyeglasses tethered by a black silk ribbon.  They were intensely respectable things when adjusted to the nose, but he knew he should clash with that old party the moment he got on the Board.  He would find him to be one of the sort that is always looking for trouble.

He wondered if he might not himself some day have sufficient excuse for wearing glasses like those, at the end of a silk ribbon.  He thought they set off the face.  And the old gentleman’s white parted beard flowed down upon a waistcoat he wouldn’t mind owning:  black silk set with tiny white stars, a good background for a small gold chain.  There would be a bunch of important keys on one end of that chain.  Bean had yearned to wear one of those key-chains, but he had never had more than a trunk-key and a latch-key, and it would look silly to pull those out on a chain before people; they’d begin to make fun of you!