" "Uh! pleasant
day," he added.
"Yes, sir!" said Tully, again distinctly.
Bean controlled himself and went to his desk.
"'Mr.' and 'Sir'! Gee! Am I as rich as _that_??" he thought.
Half an hour later it no longer seemed to him that he was rich at all.
He was seated opposite Breede taking letters in shorthand as if he were
merely a thirty-dollar-a-week Bunker Bean. Breede was refusing to
recognize any change in their relationship. He made no reference to
their talk of the day before and his detached cuffs stubbornly occupied
their old position on the desk. Was it all a dream--and the flapper,
too?
But the flapper soon called him to the telephone.
"Poor old Pops came home late, and he says you're just perfectly a
puzzle to him," she began.
"I know," said Bean; "he says he can't make me out."
"And Moms began to say the silliest things about you, until I just had
to take her seriously, so I perfectly told her that woman had come into
her own in this generation, thanks to a few noble leaders of our
sex--it's in Granny's last speech at the league--and that sent her up in
the air. I don't think she can be as well as she used to be; and I told
Pops he had to give me some money, and he said he knew it as well as I
did, so what was the use of talking about it, and so he just perfectly
gave me fifty or sixty thousand dollars and told me to make it go as far
as I could, but I don't know, that grocer says the cost of living is
going up every day because the Senate isn't insurgent enough; and anyway
I'll get the tickets and a suite on that little old boat that sails
Wednesday.
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