HARRY LEON WILSON

Author of The Spenders, The Lions of the Lord, The Boss of Little Arcady, etc.

Illustrated By F. R. Gruger

Garden City ...  New York
Doubleday, Page & Company

1913

[Illustration:  “Every time I get alone I just giggle myself into spasms.  Isn’t it the funniest?”]

To H.G.  WELLS

ILLUSTRATIONS

“Every time I get alone I just giggle myself into spasms.  Isn’t it the funniest?”

It was a friendly young face he saw there, but troubled

“I feared he was discommoding you,” ventured the Countess, elegantly apologetic

“Daughter!” said Breede with half a glance at the flapper

In that instant Bean read the flapper’s look, the look she had puzzled him with from their first meeting

“Oh, put up your trinkets!” said Bean, with a fine affectation of weariness

Thereafter, until late at night, the red car was trailed by the taxi-cab

“Lumbago!” said Bean, both hands upon the life-belt

BUNKER BEAN

I

Bunker Bean was wishing he could be different.  This discontent with himself was suffered in a moment of idleness as he sat at a desk on a high floor of a very high office-building in “downtown” New York.  The first correction he would have made was that he should be “well over six feet” tall.  He had observed that this was the accepted stature for a hero.

And the name, almost any name but “Bunker Bean!” Often he wrote good ones on casual slips of paper and fancied them his; names like Trevellyan or Montressor or Delancey, with musical prefixes; or a good, short, beautiful, but dignified name like “Gordon Dane.”  He liked that one.  It suggested something.  But Bean!  And Bunker Bean, at that!  True, it also suggested something, but this had never been anything desirable.  Just now the people in the outside office were calling him “Boston.”

“Gordon Dane,” well over six feet, abundant dark hair, a bit inclined to “wave” and showing faint lines of gray “above the temples”; for Bean also wished to be thirty years old and to have learned about women; in short, to have suffered.  Gordon Dane’s was a face before which the eyes of women would fall in half-frightened, half-ecstatic subjection, and men would feel the inexplicable magnetism of his presence.  He would be widely remarked for his taste in dress.  He would don stripes or checks without a trace of timidity.  He would quail before no violence of colour in a cravat.