“All balderdash.”
Potter got up and walked slowly across the room. It was not easy, and his father was making it harder than it ought to be. He thought he understood his position and his reason for assuming it so clearly—that they were so clear no one could fail to agree with him, yet his father utterly failed to comprehend. Potter despaired of making him understand.
“Dad,” he said, “let’s make a bargain. Give me two years. Call it a vacation or call it a course in mechanics or call it whatever you want to. We ought to know where we’re at by that time. At the end of two years I’ll come into the business and do whatever you want me to—but for two years let me go ahead with this thing and don’t interfere with me.... I’ll need some money, too. I’ve got to experiment. The experimenting won’t do any harm. It’ll be with gas-engines. Maybe I’ll turn out something that will be worth money in our business.... just two years—and I’m pretty average young yet.”
His father shrugged his shoulders. “I’ll go you,” he said, with the air of a man compelled against his will. “Two years it is, and then you quit this foolishness and come down to earth.... But it’s dog-gone nonsense.”
One man did not share this common opinion. He was the bearded, ponderous, blinking man of monstrous girth who had brought Potter into the world and fed him pills and potions for his juvenile ailments—Old Doctor Ormond.
“Potter,” said the old gentleman, “you’ve been down for three months. You’ve taken into your system only the things you should have taken into it. You have eaten as God and your stomach intended a man should eat, and drunk as they intended you should drink. You’re going to be well—as well as ever. There won’t be a limp, probably. I can guarantee that there isn’t a drop of alcohol about you. You’re going to start clean. If you’ll take my advice, which probably you won’t, you’ll keep that way. Presbyterians used to say hell was paved with unbaptized infants. I say it’s paved with cocktail-shakers....”
Potter chuckled. “I’ve been thinking about the cocktails,” he said. “I’m afraid I sha’n’t have time for them. And I used to know bartenders by their first names.”
“Do you ever feel a hankering?”
Potter shook his head. “I never did when I had anything else to do.”
“Um!... Have you anything else to do now?”