He worked on, narrowly omitting to have Breede inform the vice-president of an important trunk-line that it wouldn’t hurt him any to have those trousers pressed once in a while; also that plenty of barbers would be willing to cut his hair.

Bulger condescendingly wrote at his own typewriter, as if he were the son of a millionaire pretending to work up from the bottom.  Old Metzeger was deep in a dream of odd numerals.  The half-dozen other clerks wrought at tasks not too absorbing to prevent frequent glances at the clock on the wall.

Tully, the chief clerk, marred the familiarity of the hour by approaching Bean’s desk.  He walked lightly.  Tully always walked as if he felt himself to be on dangerously thin ice.  He might get safely across; then again he mightn’t.  He leaned confidentially on the back of Bean’s chair and Bean looked up and through the lenses that so alarmingly magnified Tully’s eyes.  Tully twitched the point of his blond beard with thumb and finger as if to reassure himself of its presence.

“By the way, Bean, I notice some fifty shares of Federal Express stock in your name.  Now it is not impossible that the office would be willing to take them over for you.”

That was Tully’s way.  He was bound to say “some” fifty shares instead of fifty, and of anything he knew to be true he could only aver “it is not impossible.”  Of a certain familiar enough event in the natural world he would have declared, “The sun sets not infrequently in the west.”

Bean was for the moment uncertain of Tully’s meaning.

“Shares,” he said.  “Right there in my desk.”

“Quite so, quite so!” said Tully.  “I’m not wholly uncertain, you know—­this is between us—­that I couldn’t place them for you.  I may say the office would not find even those few shares unwelcome.”

“Well, you see, I don’t know about that,” said Bean.  “You see, I had a kind of an idea—­”

“I think I may say they would take it not unkindly,” said Tully.

“—­of holding on to them,” concluded Bean.

“Your letting them go for a fair price might not inconceivably react to your advantage,” suggested the luminous Tully.

“It is not impossible that I shall want them myself,” responded Bean, unconsciously adopting the Tully indirection.

“The office is not unwilling—­” began Tully.

“I’ll keep ’em a while,” said Bean.  “I have a sort of plan.”

“I should not like to think it possible—­”

Bean was tired of Tully.  What was the man trying to get at, anyway?  He didn’t know; but he would shut him off.  His mind leaped with an inspiration.

“I can imagine nothing of less consequence,” said Bean.

He was at once proud of the snappy way the words came out.  Breede, he thought, could hardly have been snappier.  He glared at Tully, who looked shocked, hurt, and disgusted.  Tully sighed and walked back to his own desk, as if the ice cracked beneath his small feet at every step.