This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
BUNKER BEAN
207

flapper. "I found the darlingest old sideboard with claw-feet yesterday over on Fourth Avenue. He wants two hundred and eighty, but they're all robbers, and I just perfectly mean to make him come down five or ten dollars. Every little counts. You leave it to me."

"Sure! You fix it all up!"

"And maybe we won't want fumed oak in the dining—room maybe a rich mahogany stain. Would that suit? I'm only thinking of you."

"I'll leave all that to you; you'll perfectly well manage."

"I just perfectly darling well knew you'd say that; and I'm sending you down a car——"

"A what? Car?" This was even more alarming than the darling old sideboard.

"Just a little old last year's car. Poor old Pops would give it to me now if I asked him—but it's just as well to have it away in case Moms could ever make him change his mind, only of course she perfectly well can't do anything of the sort. But anyway I'm sending it to that shop around the corner in the street below you, and they'll hold it there to your order. You never can tell; we might need it suddenly some time, and anyway you ought to have it, don't you see, because I'm just perfectly giving it to you this minute, and you can run about in it with that dearest dog, and it's the very first thing I ever gave you, isn't it? I'll always remember it just for that. It will do us all right for a few weeks, until we can look around. And there never was any one