Page:Wilson - Bunker bean.djvu/208

186 "Well, what do you make of that?"

The sound of his own voice was startling as he caught the look of the serene Ram-tah. He softly closed the door upon what his living self had been. He was too violent.

But he could not be cool all at once. He tossed hat, stick, and gloves aside and paced the room.

Engaged to be married! That was all any one could make of it. All the agreeable iniquity had been extracted from the affair. It was fearsomely respectable. And it was deadly serious. How had he got into it? And yet he had always felt something ominous in that girl's look.

And there would be a row "back there." Julia would make the row. And Jim. 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. Tommy Hollins was a perfectly darling boy, a good sport and all that, but he couldn't be anything important to the flapper if he were the perfectly last man on earth. How any one could ever have thought such an absurd thing was beyond the flapper, for one.

And she didn't want a large place: flowers and a tennis court, and she'd do the marketing herself when she motored in for him. Moreover, he was not to be brutally domineering. He was to curb that tendency in himself, at least now and then,