"We do, don't we?"
"Do what?"
"You know, stupid!"
"Yes, yes indeed! We just perfectly do!"
"More than any two people ever did before, don't we?"
"Well, I should think so; and then some."
"I knew you'd feel that way. Well, good-bye!"
He could fancy her giving the double nod as she hung up the receiver.
During the ride uptown he talked large with a voluble gentleman who had finished his evening paper and who wished to recite its leading editorial from memory as something of his own. They used terms like "the tired business man," "increased cost of living," "small investor," "the common people," and "enemies of the Public Good." The man was especially bitter against the Wall Street ring, and remarked that any one wishing to draw a lesson from history need look no farther back than the French Revolution. The signs were to be observed on every hand.
Bean felt a little guilty, though he tried to carry it off. Was he not one of that same Wall Street ring? He pictured himself as a tired business man eating boiled eggs of a morning in a dining-room panelled with fumed oak, the flapper across the table in some little old rag. He thought it sounded pretty luxurious—like a betrayal of the common people. Still he had to follow his destiny. You couldn't get around that.
He stood a long time before Ram-tah that night,
