“Well, it won't do.” The doctor rubbed his eyelids. “You're so much better I'll have to use some machinery on you before we can know just where you are. You come down to my place this afternoon. Walk down—all the way. I suppose you know why your father wants to know.”
Bibbs nodded. “Machine-shop.”
“Still hate it?”
Bibbs nodded again.
“Don't blame you!” the doctor grunted. “Yes, I expect it'll make a lump in your gizzard again. Well, what do you say? Shall I tell him you've got the old lump there yet? You still want to write, do you?”
“What's the use?” Bibbs said, smiling ruefully. “My kind of writing!”
“Yes,” the doctor agreed. “I suppose if you broke away and lived on roots and berries until you began to 'attract the favorable attention of editors' you might be able to hope for an income of four or five hundred dollars a year by the time you're fifty.”
“That's about it,” Bibbs murmured.
“Of course I know what you want to do,” said Gurney, drowsily. “You don't hate the machine-shop only; you hate the whole show—the noise and jar and dirt, the scramble—the whole bloomin' craze to 'get on.' You'd like to go somewhere in Algiers, or to Taormina, perhaps, and bask on a balcony, smelling flowers and writing sonnets. You'd grow fat on it and have a delicate little life all to yourself. Well, what do you say? I can lie like sixty, Bibbs! Shall I tell your father he'll lose another of his boys if you don't go to Sicily?”
“I don't want to go to Sicily,” said Bibbs. “I want to stay right here.”