Those who long since gave Bean up as an insoluble problem were denied
the advantages of an early association with him. Only an acquaintance
with his innermost soul of souls could permit any sane understanding of
his works, and this it is our privilege, and our necessity, to make, if
we are to comprehend with any sympathy that which was later termed his
"madness." The examination shall be made quickly and with all decency.

Let us regard Bean through the glass of his earliest reactions to an
environment that was commonplace, unstimulating, dull--the little wooden
town set among cornfields, "Wellsville" they called it, where he came
from out of the Infinite to put on a casual body.

Of Bean at birth, it may be said frankly that he was not imposing. He
was not chubby nor rosy; had no dimples. His face was a puckered protest
at the infliction of animal life. In the white garments conventional to
his age he was a distressing travesty, even when he gurgled. In the nude
he was quite impossible to all but the most hardened mothers, and he was
never photographed thus in a washbowl. Even his own mother, before he
had survived to her one short year, began to harbour the accursed
suspicion that his beauty was not flawless nor his intelligence supreme.
To put it brutally, she almost admitted to herself that he was not the
most remarkable child in all the world. To be sure, this is a bit less
incredible when we know that Bean's mother, at his advent, thought far
less highly of Bean's father than on the occasion, seven years before,
when she had consented to be endowed with all his worldly goods. In the
course of those years she came to believe that she had married beneath
her, a fact of which she made no secret to her intimates and least of
all to her mate, who, it may be added, privately agreed with her. Alonzo
Bean, after that one delirious moment at the altar, had always