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 was for the moment uncertain of Tully's meaning.
"Shares," he said. "Right there in my desk."
"Quite so, quite so!" said Tully. "I'm not wholly uncertain, you
know--this is between us--that I couldn't place them for you.
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