nant-looking old gentleman who was so excessively
well dressed. He wore choice gold-rimmed eyeglasses tethered by a black
silk ribbon. They were intensely respectable things when adjusted to the
nose, but he knew he should clash with that old party the moment he got
on the Board. He would find him to be one of the sort that is always
looking for trouble.

He wondered if he might not himself some day have sufficient excuse for
wearing glasses like those, at the end of a silk ribbon. He thought they
set off the face. And the old gentleman's white parted beard flowed down
upon a waistcoat he wouldn't mind owning: black silk set with tiny white
stars, a good background for a small gold chain. There would be a bunch
of important keys on one end of that chain. Bean had yearned to wear one
of those key-chains, but he had never had more than a trunk-key and a
latch-key, and it would look silly to pull those out on a chain before
people; they'd begin to make fun of you!

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