"Perquisites?" frowned the Bibliomaniac. "Great Heavens, Mr. Idiot, you don't mean to insinuate that there is graft in ill health, just as there is in everything else, do you?"
"I sure do," replied the Idiot. "Take me, for instance—"
"I for one must decline to take you until I know whether you are a chronic disorder, or merely a temporary epidemic," grinned Mr. Brief.
"Idiocy is pretty contagious," smiled the Idiot, in reply, "but in this case I wish to be taken as a patient. Let us say, for instance, that I am off in the country at a popular hotel, and all of a sudden some fine morning I come down with a headache—"
"That's a debatable hypothesis," said the Lawyer. "Is it possible for the Idiot to have a headache, Doctor?"
"I have known similar cases," said the Doctor. "I knew an old soldier once who lost his leg at Gettysburg, and years afterward could still feel the twinges of rheumatism in one of his lost toes."
"Thanks for the vindication, Doctor," said the Idiot. "Nevertheless, just to please our learned brother here, I will modify the hypothesis.
"Let us suppose that I am off in the country at a popular summer hotel, and all of a sudden some fine morning I come down with a violent pain in that anatomical void where my head would be if, like Mr. Brief, I always suffered from one. I am not sick enough to stay in bed, but just badly enough off to be able to loll around the hotel piazzas all morning and look forlorn.
"Everybody in the place, of course, is immediately sympathetic. All are sorry for me, and it is such an unusual thing for one of my volatile, not to say fluffy, nature to suffer that a vast amount of commiseration is manifested by my fellow guests, especially by the ladies.
"They turn me at once into a suffering hero. As I lie listlessly in my steamer-chair they pass me by on tip-toe, or pause and inquire into the progress of my aches and show a great deal more interest in my condition than they do in bridge or votes for women. One fetching young creation in polka-dotted dimity, aged twenty-three, offers to stay home from a picnic and read Robert W. Chambers aloud to me. Another goes to her room and brings me down a little jar of mint jelly, which she feeds to me on the end of a macaroon or a lady finger, while still a third, a pretty little widow of twenty-seven summers, now and then leaves her embroidery to put a cool little hand on my forehead to see if I have any fever—"