“Well, what the devil do I care for that?”
“Haven’t I got a right to sit here?” Lucius inquired mildly. “Haven’t I got a right to sit here and drink, and cuss inside my innards, and take on the way you’re doing? Mary Ricketts just told me that she wouldn’t go to the band concert with me.”
“Oh, do dry up!”
“Well, you’re responsible for Mary’s treatment of me, aren’t you?” said Lucius. “I thought probably there’d be trouble when I saw you headed this way this afternoon.”
“You do beat any ordinary lunatic!” the distressed young man protested. “I ‘headed this way’ this afternoon because I got one of my spells. You know well enough how it is with me, and how it was with my father before me—every so often the spell come on me, and I’ve got to drink. What in the Lord’s name has that to do with Mary Ricketts? I don’t suppose I’ve even seen her for a month. Never did see anything of her, to speak of, in my life.”
Mr. Allen replenished his glass from the pitcher of buttermilk before replying, and appeared to muse sorrowfully. “Well, maybe I was mistaken,” he said. “But I——” He broke off a line of thought; then sighed and inquired: “When this ‘spell’ comes on you, Joe, you feel that you’ve ‘got’ to go on until——”
“You know I do! I don’t want to talk about it.”
“But suppose,” said Lucius, “suppose something took your mind off of it.”
“Nothing could. Nothing on earth!”
“But just suppose something did turn up—right in the start of a spell, say—something you found you’d rather do. You know, Joe, I believe if it did and you found something else was really pleasanter, it might be you’d never start in again. You’d understand it wasn’t the fun you think it is, maybe.”