“Ha, ha, ha, ha!  I should think it was.”  He was fearfully hoping her keen sense of humour might continue to rule.

“We do, don’t we?”

“Do what?”

“You know, stupid!”

“Yes, yes indeed!  We just perfectly do!”

“More than any two people ever did before, don’t we?”

“Well, I should think so; and then some.”

“I knew you’d feel that way.  Well, good-bye!”

He could fancy her giving the double nod as she hung up the receiver.

During the ride uptown he talked large with a voluble gentleman who had finished his evening paper and who wished to recite its leading editorial from memory as something of his own.  They used terms like “the tired business man,” “increased cost of living,” “small investor,” “the common people,” and “enemies of the Public Good.”  The man was especially bitter against the Wall Street ring, and remarked that any one wishing to draw a lesson from history need look no farther back than the French Revolution.  The signs were to be observed on every hand.

Bean felt a little guilty, though he tried to carry it off.  Was he not one of that same Wall Street ring?  He pictured himself as a tired business man eating boiled eggs of a morning in a dining-room panelled with fumed oak, the flapper across the table in some little old rag.  He thought it sounded pretty luxurious—­like a betrayal of the common people.  Still he had to follow his destiny.  You couldn’t get around that.

He stood a long time before Ram-tah that night, grateful for the lesson he had drawn from him in the afternoon.  Back there among those fierce-eyed directors, badgered by the most objectionable of them, nerving himself to say presently that he could imagine nothing of less consequence, there had come before his eyes the inspiring face of the wise and good king.  But most unaccountably, as he gazed, it seemed to him that the great Ram-tah had opened those long-closed eyes; opened them full for a moment; then allowed the left eye to close swiftly.

XI

The day began with placid routine.  Breede did his accustomed two-hours’ monologue.  And no one molested Bean.  No one appeared to know that he was other than he seemed, and that big things were going forward.  Tully ignored him.  Markham, who had the day before called him “Old man!” whistled obliviously as they brushed past each other in the hall.  No directors called him in to tell him that would never do with them.

He was grateful for the lull.  He couldn’t be “stirred up” that way every day.  And he needed to gather strength against Breede when Breede should discover that exquisite joke of the flapper’s.  He suspected that the flapper wouldn’t find it funny to keep the thing from poor old Pops more than a few days longer.

“I’ll be drawing my last pay next Saturday,” he told himself.