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Page 43
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_ flirt with "any one," no doubt
about that. She adroitly revealed to Bean an unshakable conviction that
he was desperately enamoured of her, and that it served him right for a
presumptuous nobody. She talked to him, preened herself in his gaze, and
maddened him with a manner of deadly roguishness. Then she flew to exert
the same charm upon any one of the resplendent young men who were
constantly riding over or tooting over in big black motor-cars. They
were young men who apparently had nothing to do but "go in" for
things--riding, tennis, polo, golf. To all of them she was the
self-confident charmer; just the kind of a girl to make a fool of you
and tell about it.
Twenty-four hours after her first assault upon him he was still wrecking
the ship at the entrance to that lagoon, but now he watched the big
sister go down for the third time while he placidly rescued a stoker to
share his romantic isolation.
The flapper and Grandma, the Demon, were even more objectionable, and,
what was worse, they alarmed him. Puzzled as to their purpose, he knew
not what defence to make. He was swept on some secret and sinister
current to an end he could not divine.
The flapper lay in wait for him at all hours when he might appear. Did
he open a door, she lurked in the corridor; did he seek refuge in the
gloom of the library, she arose to confront him from its dimmest nook;
did he plan a masterly escape by a rear stairway, she burst upon him
from the ambush of some exotic shrub to demand which way he had thought
of going. He had never thought of a way that did not prove to have been
her own. The creature was a leech! If she had only talked, he believed
that he could have thrown her off. But she would not talk. She merely
walked beside him insatiably. Sometimes he thought he could detect a
faint anxiety in the look she kept upon him, but, mostly, it was the
look of something calm, secure, ruthless. Something! It unnerved him.
It was usually probable that Grandma, the Demon, would join them, the
silver cigarette case dangling at her girdle. Then was he sorely beset.
They would perhaps talk about him over his head, discuss his points as
if he were some new beast from the stables.
"I tell you, he's over an inch taller than I am," announced the flapper.
"U-u-mm!" replied Grandma, measuring Bean's stature with narrowed eye.
"U-u-mm!"
"You show her!" commanded flapper, in a louder voice, as if she believed
him deaf. She grasped his arm and whirled him about to stand with his
back to hers.
"There!" said the flapper tensely, her eyes staring ahead. "There!"
"You're scrooching!" accused the Demon.
"Not a bit!--and see how square his shoulders are!" She turned to point
out this grace of the animal.
"Ever take any drugs? Ever get any habits like that?" queried the Demon.
Plainly Bean's confession to an unusual virtue had aroused her
suspicion. He might be a drug fiend!
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