“William is my friend,” thinks I, and I seen right off he was one of them serious kids that you can't tell what is going on inside their heads.
So she calls James, which was the butler, and James he buttled me into a bathroom the like of which I never see before; and he buttled me into a suit of somebody's clothes and into a room at the top of the house next to his'n, and then he come back and buttled a razor and a comb and brush at me; him being the most mournful-looking fat man I ever seen, and he informs me that me not being respectable I will eat alone in the kitchen after the servants is done. People has made them errors about me before. And I looks around the room and I thinks to myself that this is all right so far as it has went. But is these four walls, disregarding the rest of the house, to be my home, and them only? Not, thinks I, if little Billy knows it. It was not me that invited myself to become the guest of this family; and if I got to be a guest I be damned if I don't be one according to Hoyle's rules of etiquette or I'll quit the job. Will I stay in this one room? Not me. Suppose the perfessor takes it next? And then William Dear? And suppose when William Dear gets through with it he gives it to Aunt Estelle? Am I to waste the golden hours when, maybe, my country needs me, just for accommodation? But I thinks it's all right for a day or two and then I'll leave my regrets and go on down to Saint Looey or somewheres. And then James he buttles back into the room like a funeral procession and says the perfessor says he wants to see me in the laboratory.
That was a big room and the darndest looking room I ever see, and it smelt strong enough to chase a Hungarian pig sticker out of a Chicago slaughter house. It smelt like a drug store had died of old age and got buried in a glue factory. I never seen so much scientific effusions and the things to hold 'em in mixed up in one place before. They must of been several brands of science being mixed up there all to once. They was dinky little stoves, they was glass jars of all shapes and sizes labeled with Dago names standing around on shelves like in one of them Dutch delicatessen stores; they was straight glass tubes and they was glass tubes that had the spinal contortions; they was bones and they was whole skeletons, and they was things that looked like whisky stills; they was a bookcase full of bugs and butterflies against one wall; they was chunks of things that might have been human for all I know floating around in vats like pickled pork in a barrel; they was beer schooners with twisted spouts to them; they was microscopes and telescopes and twenty-seven shapes and sizes of knives; they was crates of stuff that was unpacked and crates that wasn't; and they was tables with things just piled and spilled over 'em, every which way, and the looks of everything was dirty on account of the perfessor not allowing any one in there but himself and Miss Estelle and William. And whether you knowed anything about them different brands of science or not you could see the perfessor was one of them nuts that's always starting to do things and then leaving them go and starting something else. It looked as if the operating room of an emergency hospital and a blacksmith shop and a people's free museum and a side show full of freaks, snakes and oneeyed calves had all gone out and got drunk together, all four of them, and wandered into a cremation plant to sleep off that souse; and when they woke up they couldn't tell which was which nor nothing else except they had a bad taste in their mouth and was sentenced to stay there unseparated and unhappy and unsociable in each other's company for evermore. And every time you turned around you stepped on something new, and if you saw a rat or a lizard or a spider you better let him alone for how was you going to tell he was dead or alive till he crawled up you?
The perfessor, he was setting over by a window, and he pushed out another chair for me and he says sit down.
“You are a gentleman of leisure?” he says, with a grin; or words to that effect.
“I work at that sometimes,” I told him, “although it ain't rightly my trade.”
“Biddy Malone says you're an agnostic,” he says, looking at me close. It won't do, I thinks, to spring none of them agnostic gags on him, so I says nothing.
“I'm one myself,” he says.
“Regular,” I asks him, “or just occasional?” He kind o' grins again, and I thinks: “Billy, you're making a hit somehow.”
Then he says, like he was apologizing to someone about something: “Being interested in sociology and the lower classes in general, I sent for you to get some first-hand observations on your train of mind,” he says. Or it was words like them. “I'm a sociologist,” he says.