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And he was to be there at nine sharp, which was too early, but the flapper could be sure only after he came that nothing had happened to him, that he had neither failed in business, been poisoned by some article of food not on her list, nor diverted by that possible Other One who seemed always to lurk in the flapper's mental purlieus.
Her forehead, but a moment before as white as marble, was rosy; she had once more assumed her cheeky flapper's expression. He drew near to her, gazed into the fascinating grey of her eyes, and, as on the evening before, when he sat in front of his coke-fire, he reflected that she was untruthful and cowardly, and ill-natured toward her friends; but now the thought was tempered with indulgence.
And that was because there had been no provision made on the little old steamer for this invasion of casual Breedes. Pops and Moms had secured an officer's room; the Demon, rather than sit up in the smoking-room of nights, had consented to share the flapper's suite; and Bean had been taken in charge by a cold-blooded steward who left him in the narrow quarters of the Hartford person.
It was a comparison that would have intensely interested the flapper's mother, who was this time regarding Bean through her glazed weapon as if he were some queer growth the head gardener had brought from the conservatory. Grandma deftly probed his past for affairs of the heart.
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.
Worry makes folks gray-headed." She scratched her head where three gray braids, about the length and thickness of a flapper's eyebrow, stuck out at odd angles. "I sho got plenty chancet to worry ifen I wants to," she mused, as she sipped water from a fruit-jar foul with fingermarks. "Relief folks got me on dey black list.
The wives just at this point, instead of sitting tight, made the strategic mistake of turning the full force of the ammunition of gossip, which should have been saved for defending husbands from poachers, into an offensive attack on the flapper's lip stick, on her cigarettes, and on her petting parties. Whenever two or three wives were gathered together, their topic was our Wild Young People.
There was Fips, the barrister; heaven knows what he was doing at Paris; and Gortz, the West Indian, who was there on the same business, and Flapper, a medical student, all these three I met one night at Flapper's rooms, where Jack was invited, and a great "spread" was laid in honor of him.
And in that instant Bean read the flapper's look, the look she had puzzled him with from their first meeting. It was like finally understanding an oft-heard phrase in a foreign tongue. How luminous that look was now! The simple look of proud and assured and most determined ownership! It lay quietly on her face now as always.
He interrogated his lawful owner from the flapper's embrace, then reached up to implant a moist salute upon the ear of Grandma, who at once removed herself from his immediate presence. "Sit there yourself," she commanded Bean. And Bean sat there beside the flapper, with Nap between them. The car moved gently on under the gaze of the impressed Cassidy, who had clattered up the iron stairway.
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