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"'S what she said before," grunted Breede. "Tha's nothing new." "And she says we're snoop-cats and we might as well go back home now," continued the Demon. "Says she's got the u-u-m-mm! says to perfectly quit tagging." "Nothing can matter now," said the bereaved mother. "He's talking himself," said the Demon. "Mercy he's got a new voice ... sounds like another man.
Would the flapper telephone to him there? Send him unpoisoned canned food? Would he be disgraced? Breede directors glamour wearing off slinking gazelles with yellow whiskers rotten perfumery. So rushed the turbulent flood of his mind. But the letter was finished at last.
They might think Jim wouldn't help in the row, but he knew better. Jim was old Jim Breede, who would of course take Bunker Bean's head off. He had been a fool all the time. In the car he had strained himself to the point of mentioning the Hollins boy. The flapper had laughed unaffectedly.
He first tried Bulger, who owed him ten dollars. But this was a Waterloo. "Too bad, old top!" sympathized Bulger. "If you'd only sejested it yesterday. But you know how it is when a man's out; he's got to make a flash; got to keep up his end." He considered the others in the office. Most of them, he decided, would, like Bulger, have been keeping their ends up. Of course, there was Breede.
Breede, he thought, could hardly have been snappier. He glared at Tully, who looked shocked, hurt, and disgusted. Tully sighed and walked back to his own desk, as if the ice cracked beneath his small feet at every step. Bean resumed his work, with the air of one forgetting a past annoyance. But he was not forgetting.
He worked on, narrowly omitting to have Breede inform the vice-president of an important trunk-line that it wouldn't hurt him any to have those trousers pressed once in a while; also that plenty of barbers would be willing to cut his hair. Bulger condescendingly wrote at his own typewriter, as if he were the son of a millionaire pretending to work up from the bottom.
He wished he might pass the purple-faced old gentleman the whole Breede gang, for that matter and chew the cigar at them. "I'll show them," he muttered, over and around the impeding cigar. "I'll show them they can't keep me off that board. I knew what to do in a minute. Napoleon of Finance, eh? I'll show them who's who!" He was back at his desk finishing the last of Breede's letters for the day.
Bean continued his work, thinking as best he could above the words of Breede, that she must be a pretty raw old party, going around, voting, smashing windows, leading her innocent young grandchild into the same reckless life. Nice thing, that! He was not surprised when he heard a match lighted a moment later, and knew that Grandma was smoking a cigarette. Expect anything of that sort!
He copied from the letter that portion of it which seemed relevant, and destroyed the original. He had never heard it said of Breede; but he knew there are times when, under continued mental strain, the most abstemious of men will relax.
His demeanour toward Bean betrayed no recognition of shares or pitchers or big red cars, nor of the ever-impending change in their relationship. He dictated fragments of English words, and Bean reconstructed them with the cunning of a Cuvier. He felt astute, robust, and disrespectful. Just one wrong word from Breede and all would be over between them.
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