"Why not devote that massive brain of yours to the working out of the idea?" suggested the Bibliomaniac. "The great trouble with you, Mr. Idiot, is that you are prolific in thinking out things that ought to be done, but there you stop. How to do them you never tell us. Why don't you give us a constructive notion once in awhile?"
"Thank you, Mr. Bib," said the Idiot, with a grateful smile. "I've been fishing for that particular nibble for the past eighteen minutes, and I was beginning to fear the shad were shy this morning. You have saved the day, Sir. Speaking of Mr. Bib's idea that we ought to have something to take the place of the sanitarium for the tired business man, Doctor, how do you think an irritarium would pay?"
"A what?" cried the Doctor, holding his waffle like Mohammed's coffin, suspended in midair.
"An irritarium," repeated the Idiot. "An institution of aggravation, where, instead of being coddled into permanent invalidism, we should be constantly irritated, provoked, exacerbated, or, as my old friend Colonel Thesaurus says in his Essay on Excitation, exasperated into a cantankerously contentious pugnacity!"
"And for what purpose, pray?" demanded the Bibliomaniac.
"As an anti-coddling resource for the restoration of our pristine powers," said the Idiot. "Just take our old friend, the tired business man, for example. He has been working forty-eight hours a day all winter long, and with the coming of spring he is first cousin to the frazzle, and in the matter of spine twin brother to the jellyfish. His middle name is Flabby, and his nerve has succumbed to the superior numbers of nerves.
"He is headed straight for the Down-and-Out Club. His lip quivers when he talks, and his hand is the center of a seismic disturbance that turns his autograph into a cross between a dress pattern and a futurist conception of a straight line in the cold gray dawn of the morning after. He has prolonged fits of weeping, and when it comes to making up his mind on any definite course of action he vacillates between two possibilities until it is too late, and then decides wrong.
"Now, under present conditions they railroad this poor wreck off to a sanitarium, where the very atmosphere that he breathes is the dread thing that has haunted his sleepless hours all winter long—that of retirement. He is made to believe that he is a vurry, vurry sick man, and the only real pleasure that is left to him is bragging about his symptoms to some other unfortunate incarcerated with him; and after each period of boastful exposure of these symptoms in the exchange provided for the swapping of these things in the sanitariums of the day, he goes back to his room more than ever convinced that his case is hopeless; and, confronted by the bogey of everlasting ill health, he lets go of himself altogether and a long, long, tedious period of rehabilitation begins which may or may not get him into shape again in time for the fall season."
"It's the only way," said the Doctor. "Don't fight your doctor. Just let go of yourself, and let him do the rest."
"Well, I'd like to see my system tried for a while," said the Idiot. "I'll guarantee that any tired business man who will go to my irritarium will get his spine and his spunk, his nerve and his dander, back in a jiffy.