endured by one of his volunteer assistants.
Suavely the entertainer begged the help of "some kind gentleman from the
audience." He was insistent, exerting upon the reluctant ones the
pressure of his best platform manner.

When the pause had grown embarrassing, a shamed looking man slouched
forward from an aisle seat amid hearty cheers. He ascended the carpeted
runway from aisle to stage, stumbled over footlights and dropped his
hat. Then the magician harried him to the malicious glee of the
audience. He removed playing-cards, white rabbits and articles of
feminine apparel from beneath the coat of his victim. He seated him in a
chair that collapsed. He gave him a box to hold and shocked him
electrically. He missed his watch and discovered it in the abused man's
pocket. And when the ordeal was over the recovered hat was found to
contain guinea-pigs. The kind gentleman from the audience had been shown
to be transcendently awkward, brainless, and to have a mania for petty
thievery. With burning face and falling glance, he had stumbled back to
his seat, where a lady who had before exhibited the public manner of
wife to husband toward him, now pretended that he was an utter and
offensive stranger.

Bean, I say, had once suffered vicariously with this altruistic dolt.
His suffering now was not vicarious. For three days he endured on the
raw of his own soul tortures even more ingeniously harrowing.

To be shut up for three hours a day with Breede was bad enough, but
custom had a little dulled his sensitiveness to this. And he could look
Breede over and write down in beautiful shorthand what he thought of
him.

But the other Breedes!

Mrs. Breede, a member of one of the very oldest families in Omaha, he
learned, terrified him exceedingly. She was an advanced dresser--he had
to admit that--but she was no longer beautiful. She was a plucked rose
that had been too long kept; the petals were rusting, crumpling at the
edges. He wondered if Breede had ever wished to be wrecked on a desert
island with her. She surveyed Bean through a glass-and-gold weapon with
a long handle, and on the two subsequent occasions when she addressed
him called him Mr. Brown. Once meeting him in the hall, she seemed to
believe that he had been sent to fix the telephone.

And the flapper's taller sister of the languishing glance--how quickly
had she awakened him from that golden dream of the low-lying atoll and
the wrecked ship in a far sea. She _did