To give you the idea, one day he appears in the papers cutting a piece out of one of them round coffee cakes and the next day there is nineteen round coffee cakes delivered to his address and he does not like round coffee cakes nor no kind of coffee cakes, but is cutting this here piece to please the press photographer who wants a homey touch.
But for everybody what is giving him something there is two wanting him to give them something. Jimmie used to say he got so he could tell right off who was a givee and who was a gimme. Not that he does not appreciate what is give him, even if he does not keep it, and not that he does not hand out to the gimmes—it is just that he does not want nothing off of nobody and does not want nobody to want nothing off of him.
But when you gets in the major brackets that is not the way things is. So, like I said, it changes him some. Some way, he reminds me of a kid what has eat a quarter's worth of jelly beans all one flavor.
It changes Ditsy, too. Her hair is not loose-like and fluffy no more. It is on the order of a cocker spaniel's, only precise, and her ears has got earbobs in them, and instead of wearing print housedresses she is all diked out in them dresses which is not referred to as dresses, but as "creations." She has got a new wheelchair which is streamlined and has more chrome on it than a limousine, and some bird with a Vandyke and a accent you can spread like marmalade is giving her some kind of underwater massage for her legs, so she should be very happy. She is not, though.
She puts on like she is happy and anybody what does not know her would say, "My, she is happy," and they would be ninety-nine and forty-four hundreds percent wrong because she is not happy by no means. She fools Jimmie because Jimmie is so anxious for her to be happy that, when she keeps saying she is happy, he believes she is happy and it does not occur to him that when you are happy you does not go around saying, "My, I am happy," like you was learning a lesson in memorizing.
When a woman is happy she sings and brushes her hair a lot and says stuff like, "I declare, it is four o'clock already, can you beat that?" and she looks smily even when she is not actually smiling. So it is obvious Ditsy is not happy because she is not doing none of them things. When she smiles it is more or less of a lip movement going on under her nose and not having nothing to do with the rest of her face, and she does not sing spontaneous, though when she is in that two-room flat the landlady has had to request her several times to pipe down. And, instead of saying, "I declare it is four o'clock already," she just says, "It is four o'clock," like you would say, "The dodo is now become extinct," or, "I see where there in a population of ninety-two in East Gleep, Nevada."
So, as I said, it changes Ditsy, too. And it is pathetic to watch them two, him and her, working so hard at being happy and pretending that life is a bowl of cherries when it is plain life is a onion poultice.
Some time passes and I am here, there, and yonder and word gets around that Jimmie Winkie is hitting the paint which occasions me to be surprised because Jimmie Winkie is never one to hit the paint even in a mild manner. So I am not paying any attention to these here remarks and I am once or twice very near smacking persons in the puss who say that it is a fact that Ditsy is turned into a red-hot momma.
What's that? Oh, that. Well, it seems that this here underwater massage is the stuff and she is able to get around some—not good, understand, but some.