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Page 102
When he had a little dulled the edge of his hunger, he rang a bell.
"Find m' wife," he commanded the Swiss youth, only to be met with a look
of blankness. He was considering if it might do him good to make a row
about this--he had always been afraid to make rows--but the other door
of the drawing-room opened. His wife was found.
"'S all for 's aft'noon," he exploded to the servitor, who seemed not
displeased to withdraw from this authoritative presence. Then he engaged
a slice of bacon with a ruthless fork.
"Where you _been_?" he demanded of the flapper. Only way to do--go at
them hammer and tongs!
The flapper gazed at him from the doorway. She was still pale and there
were reddened circles about her eyes. The little old rag of a morning
robe she wore added to her pallor and gave her an unaccustomed look of
fragility.
"Where you been all the time?" repeated her husband with the arrogance
of a confirmed upstart.
The flapper seemed to be on the point of tears, but she came into the
room and sat across the table from him. In spite of the blurring
moisture in her eyes he could still read the old look of ownership. Time
had not impaired it.
"I just perfectly wouldn't let them know I felt bad," she began. "I said
I was going to sleep and wouldn't worry one bit if you perfectly never
came home all night. And you never did, because I couldn't sleep and
watched ... but I wouldn't let them know it for just perfectly old hundred
thousand dollars. And this morning I said I'd had a bully sleep and felt
fit and you had a right to go where you wanted to and they could please
mind their own affairs, and I laughed so at them when they said they
were going for the police--"
"Police, eh? Let 'em bring their old police. They think I'm afraid of
police?" He valiantly attacked an egg.
"Of course not, stupid, but they thought you might wander off and get
lost, like those people in the newspapers that wake up in Jersey City or
some place and can't remember their own names or how it happened, and
they wanted the police to just perfectly find you, and I wanted them to,
too. I was deathly afraid--"
"I know my own name, all right. I'm little Tempest and Sunshine; that's
my name.
"--but I wouldn't let them know I was afraid. And I laughed at them and
told them they didn't know you at all and that you'd come home--come
home."
He found he could strangely not be an upstart another moment in the
presence of that flapper. He was over kneeling beside her, reaching his
arms up about her, pressing her cheek down to his. The flapper held him
tightly and wept.
"There, there!" he soothed her, smoothing the golden brown hair that
spilled about her shoulders. "No one ever going to hurt you while I'm
around. You're the just perfectly _dearest_, if you come right down to
it. Now, now! 'S all right. Everything all right!"
"It's those perfectly old taggers," exploded the flapper, suddenly
recovering her true form, "just furiously tagging."
"'S got to stop right now," declared Bean, rising. "Wipe that egg off
your face, and let's get out of here."
"London," she suggested brightly. "Granny has always--"
"No London!" he broke in, visibly returning to the Corsican or upstart
manner. "And no Grandma, no Pops, no Moms! You and me--us--understand
what I mean? Think I'm going to have my wife sloshing around over there,
voting, smashing windows, getting run in and sent to the island for
thirty days. No! Not for little old George W. Me!"
"I never wanted to so very much," confessed the flapper with surprising
meekness. "You tell where to go, then."
Bean debated. Baseball! Perhaps there would be a game on the home
grounds that day. Paris might be playing London or St. Petersburg or
Berlin or Venice.
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