"If you'd try some fruit and two eggs," suggested the flapper.
He raised a futile hand defensively, and an expression of acute
repugnance was to be seen upon his yellowed face.
"Please, please go 'way," he murmured. "Let Julia do fussing. Go way off
to other end of little old steamer; stay there."
The flapper saw it was no time for woman's nursing. Sadly she went.
"Telephone to a drug-store," demanded Bean after her, but she did not
hear.
He continued to die, mercifully unmolested, until the man from Hartford
came in to ascertain if his locks had been tampered with.
"Hold to the all good!" urged the man at a moment when it was too
poignantly, too openly certain that Bean could hold to very little
indeed.
"Uh-hah!" gasped Bean.
"Go into the silence," urged the man kindly.
"You go--" retorted Bean swiftly; but he should not further be shamed by
the recording of language which he lived to regret.
The Hartford man said, "Tut-tut-tut!" and went elsewhere than he had
been told to go.
There ensued a dreadful time of alternating night and day, with
recurrent visions of the flapper, who perfectly knew and said that he
had been eating stuff out of the wrong cans.
"'As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he'," affirmed the Hartford
person each morning as he shaved.
And a merry party gathered in the adjoining stateroom of afternoons and
sang songs of the jolly sailor's life: "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean,"
and "Sailing, Sailing Over the Bounding Main.
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