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158 flapper was not to appear. Voting and smashing windows were bad enough.

He tried at first to talk to the flapper about Tommy Hollins, whom he airily designated as "that Hollins boy." It seemed to be especially needed, because the Hollins boy arrived after breakfast every day and left only in the late afternoon. But the flapper declined nevertheless to consider him as meat for serious converse.

Bean considered that this was sheer flirting, whereupon he flung principle to the winds and flirted himself.

"You show signs of life," declared Grandma, who was quick to note this changed demeanor. And Bean smirked like a man of the world.

"She never set her mind on anything yet that she didn't get it," added Grandma, naming no one. "She's like her father there."

And Bean strolled off to enjoy a vision of himself defeating her purpose to ensnare the Hollins youth. Once he would have considered it crass presumption, but that was before a certain sarcophagus on the left bank of the Nile had been looted of its imperial occupant. Now he merely recalled a story about a King Cophetua and a beggar maid. 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. She pointedly had him alone, and her