Head, next A.M.?--ask me, _ask_ me! Nothing of the kind! Don't I show
up with a toothache and con old Tully into a day off at the dentist's to
have the bridge-work tooled up. Ask me was I at the dentist's? Wow!
Not!--little old William J. Turkish bath for mine!"
Bean was moved to raw envy. But he knew himself too well. The specialist
he professed to have consulted had put a ban upon the simplest
recreations. Otherwise how could he with any grace have declined those
repeated invitations of Bulger's to come along and meet a couple of
swell dames that'd like to have a good time? Bulger, considered in
relation to the sex not his own, was what he himself would have termed
"a smooth little piece of work." Bean was not this. Of all his terrors
women, as objects of purely male attention, were the greatest. He longed
for them, he looked upon such as were desirable with what he believed to
be an evil eye, but he had learned not to go too close. They talked,
they disconcerted him horribly. And if they didn't talk they looked
dangerous, as if they knew too much. Some day, of course, he would nerve
himself to it. Indeed he very determinedly meant to marry, and to have a
son who should be trained from the cradle with the sole idea of making
him a great left-handed pitcher; but that was far in the future. He
longed tragically to go with Bulger and meet a couple of swell dames,
but he knew how it would be.
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