VIII
FOR TIRED BUSINESS MEN
"Poor old Binks!" said the Idiot sympathetically, as he put down a letter just received from his friend and turned his attention to the waffles. "He's spending the good old Summer time in a sanitarium, just because he thinks he's got nervous prostration, and the Lord knows when he'll be back in harness again."
"Who's Binks?" asked the Lawyer. "You talk as if the name of Binks were a household word."
"Well, it is, in a way," said the Idiot. "Binks is one of those tired business men that we hear so much of these days. The kind they write comic operas and popular novels for, with all the thought taken out so that he may not have to burden his mind with anything worth thinking about. He's one of these billionaire slaves who's lost his thumb cutting off coupons and employs seventeen clerks with rubber stamps to sign his checks for him. He's succumbed to the strain of it all at last, and now the gobelins have got him. Do you approve of these sanitariums, Doctor?"
"I most certainly do," said the Doctor. "Sanitariums are the greatest blessings of modern life, and, for my part, I'd like to see a law passed requiring everybody to spend a month in one of them every year of his life, where he could be under constant scientific supervision. It would add ten years to the lives of every one of us."
"Well, I hope you are right, but I don't know," said the Idiot dubiously. "Seems to me there's too much coddling going on at those places, and mighty few people get well on coddling. I've given the matter some thought, and I've known a lot of men who had nothing but a pain in their toe who got so much sympathy over it that they became hopeless invalids inside of a year. There's more truth than humor in that joke about the little Irish boy who was asked how his mother was and replied that she was enjoying poor health this year."
"O, that's all tommyrot," said the Doctor. "Perfect nonsense—"
"I hope so," said the Idiot, "but after all nobody can deny that there are a great many people in this world who really do enjoy bad health who wouldn't if it weren't for the perquisites."