er office opened with a sharp rattle.

"Wantcha!" said Breede.

There was a fateful, trembling moment in which Breede was like to have
been blasted; it was as if the magnate had wantonly affronted him who
had once been the recipient of a second funeral in Paris. Keeping Bean
from a ball game aroused that one-time self of his as perhaps nothing
else would have done. But Breede was Breede, after all, and Bean
swallowed the hot words that rose to his lips. His perturbation was
such, however, that Breede caught something of it.

"Hadjer lunch?"

"No!" said Bean, murderously.

"Gitcha some quick. Hurry!"

He knew the worst now. The afternoon was gone.

"Don't want any!" It was a miniature explosion after the Breede manner.

"C'mon, then!"

He was at the desk and Breede dictated interminably. When pauses came he
wrote scathing comments on Breede's attire, his parsimony in the matter
of food, his facial defects, and some objectionable characteristics as a
human being, now perceived for the first time. He grew careless of
concealing his attitude. Once he stared at Breede's detached cuffs with
a scorn so malevolent that Breede turned them about on the desk to
examine them himself. Bean went white, feeling "ready for anything!" but
Breede merely continued his babble about "Federal Express" stock, and
"first mortgage refunding 4 per cent. gold bonds," and multifarious
other imbecilities that now filled a darkened world.

He jealously watched the letters Breede answered and laid aside, and the
sheaf of reports that he juggled from hand to hand. His hope had been
that the session might be brief. There was no clock in the room and he
several times felt for the absent watch. Then he tried to estimate the
time. When he believed it to be one o'clock he diversified his notes
with a swift summary of Breede's character which only the man's
bitterest enemies would have approved. At what he thought was two
o'clock he stripped him of the last shreds of moral decency. When three
o'clock seemed to arrive he did not dare put down, even in secretive
shorthand, what he felt could justly be said of Breede. After that it
was no good hoping. He relaxed into the dullness of a big despair,
merely reflecting that Bulger's picture of Breede under his heel had
been too mushily humane. What Bean wished at the moment was to have
Breede tied to a stake, and to be carving choice morsels from him with a
dull knife. He made the picture vivacious.