the
flapper and Grandma, the Demon, still bestowed upon him. Where he had
once fled, he now put himself in the way of them. He listened with
admirably simulated interest to Grandma's account of the suffrage play
for which she was rehearsing. She was to appear in the mob scene. He was
certain she would lend vivacity to any mob. But he was glad that the
flapper was not to appear. Voting and smashing windows were bad enough.

He tried at first to talk to the flapper about Tommy Hollins, whom he
airily designated as "that Hollins boy". It seemed to be especially
needed, because the Hollins boy arrived after breakfast every day and
left only in the late afternoon. But the flapper declined nevertheless
to consider him as meat for serious converse.

Bean considered that this was sheer flirting, whereupon he flung
principle to the winds and flirted himself.

"You show signs of life," declared Grandma, who was quick to note this
changed demeanor. And Bean smirked like a man of the world.

"She never set her mind on anything yet that she didn't get it," added
Grandma, naming no one. "She's like her father there."

And Bean strolled off to enjoy a vision of himself defeating her purpose
to ensnare the Hollins youth. Once he would have considered it crass
presumption, but that was before a certain sarcophagus on the left bank
of the Nile had been looted of its imperial occupant. Now he merely
recalled a story about a King Cophetua and a beggar maid. It was a
comparison that would have intensely interested the flapper's mother,
who was this time regarding Bean through her glazed weapon as if he were
some queer growth the head gardener had brought from the conservatory.

Grandma deftly probed his past for affairs of the heart. She pointedly
had him alone, and her intimation was that he might talk freely, as to a
woman of understanding and broad sympathy. But Bean made a wretched mess
of it.

Certainly there had been "affairs." There was the girl in Chicago, two
doors down the street, whom he had once taken to walk in the park, but
only once, because she talked; the girl in the business college who had
pretty hair and always smiled when she looked at him; and another who,
he was almost sure, had sent him an outspoken valentine; yes, there had
been plenty of girls, but he hadn't bothered much about them.

And Grandma, plainly incredulous, averred that he was too deep for her.
Bean was on the point of inventing a close acquainta