"What the devil did you bring me up here for?" I demanded.
"Oh, just to enjoy your society. I get lonesome sometimes. I tell you a man does get lonesome in this world, when he has nothing to lean on but a blooming button factory and a stepmother who flits among the world's expensive sanatoria. I know you have never had 'Button, button, who's got the button?' chanted in your ears, but may I ask whether you have ever known the joy of a stepmother? I can see that your answer will be an unregretful negative."
He was quite the fool again, and stared at me vacuously.
"My stepmother is not the common type of juvenile fiction. She has never attempted during her widowhood to rob the orphan or to poison him. Bless your Irish heart, no! She's a good woman, and rich in her own right, but I couldn't stand her dietary. She's afraid I'm going to die, Donovan! She thinks everybody's going to die. Father died of pneumonia and she said ice-water in the finger-bowl did it, and she wanted to have the butler arrested for murder. She had a new disease for me every morning. It was worse than being left with a button-works to draw a stepmother like that. She ate nothing but hot water and zweibach herself, and shuddered when I demanded sausage and buckwheat cakes every day. She wept and talked of the duty she owed to my poor dead father; she had promised him, she said, to safeguard my health; and there I was, as strong as an infant industry, weighed a hundred and seventy-six pounds when I was eighteen, and had broken all the prep school records. She made me so nervous talking about her symptoms, and mine—that I didn't have!—that I began taking my real meals in the gardener's house. But to save her feelings I munched a little toast with her. She caught me one day clearing up a couple of chickens and a mug of bass with the gardener, and it was all over. She had noticed, she said, that I had been coughing of late—I was doing a few cigarettes too many, that was all—and wired to New York for doctors. She had all sorts, Donovan—alienists and pneumogastric specialists and lung experts.
"The people on Strawberry Hill thought there was a medical convention in town. I was kidnapped on the golf course, where I was about to win the eastern Connecticut long-drive cup, and locked up in a dark room at home for two days while they tested me. They made all the known tests, Donovan. They tested me for diseases that haven't been discovered yet, and for some that have been extinct since the days of Noah. You can see where that put me. I was afraid to fight or sulk for fear the alienists would send me to the madhouse. I was afraid to eat for fear they would think that was a symptom, and every time I asked for food the tape-worm man looked intelligent and began prescribing, while the rest of them were terribly chagrined because they hadn't scored first. The only joy I got out of the rumpus was in hitting one of those alienists a damned hard clip in the ribs, and I'm glad I did it. He was feeling my medulla oblongata at the moment, and as I resent being man-handled I pasted him one—he was a young chap, and fair game—I pasted him one, and then grabbed a suit-case and slid. I stole away in a clam-boat for New Haven, and kept right on up into northern Maine, where I stayed with the Indians until my father's relict went off broken-hearted to Bad Neuheim to drink the waters. And here I am, by the grace of God, in perfect health and in full control of the button market of the world."
"You have undoubtedly been sorely tried," I said as he broke off mournfully. In spite of myself I had been entertained. He was undeniably a fellow of curious humor and with unusual experience of life. He followed me to the street, and as I rode away he called me back as though to impart something of moment.
"Did you ever meet Charles Darwin?"
"He didn't need me for proof, Buttons."
"I wish I might have had one word with him. It's on my mind that he put the monkeys back too far. I should be happier if he had brought them a little nearer up to date. I should feel less lonesome, Irishman."
He stopped me again.