“What’s dairy-kitchen?”
“This is. All these white tiles and fixings. It makes me feel like a pint of milk to look at ’em.”
“It’s because of the germs.”
“Ain’t I telling you the germs don’t want to hurt you?”
“Aunt Lora told Mamie they do.”
“Say, cull, you tell your Aunt Lora to make a noise like an ice-cream in the sun and melt away. She’s a prune, and what she says don’t go. Do you want to know what a germ or a microbe—it’s the same thing—really is? It’s a fellow that has the best time you can think of. They’ve been fooling you, kid. They saw you were easy, so they handed it to you on a plate. I’m the guy that can put you wise about microbes.”
“Tell me.”
“Sure. Well, a microbe is a kid that just runs wild out in the country. He don’t have to hang around in a white-tiled nursery and eat sterilized junk and go to bed when they tell him to. He has a swell time out in the woods, fishing and playing around in the dirt and going after birds’ eggs and picking berries, and—oh, shucks, anything else you can think of. Wouldn’t you like to do that?”
William Bannister nodded.
“Well, say, as it happens, there’s a fine chance for you to be a germ right away. I know a little place down in the Connecticut woods which would just hit you right. You could put on overalls——”