My barber continued to look at me narrowly.
"What razor do you use?" he said.
"A safety razor," I answered.
The barber had begun to dash soap over my face; but he stopped—aghast at what I had said.
A safety razor to a barber is like a red rag to a bull.
"If it was me," he went on, beating lather into me as he spoke, "I wouldn't let one of them things near my face: No, sir: There ain't no safety in them. They tear the hide clean off you—just rake the hair right out by the follicles," as he said this he was illustrating his meaning with jabs of his razor,—"them things just cut a man's face all to pieces," he jabbed a stick of alum against an open cut that he had made,—"And as for cleanliness, for sanitation, for this here hygiene and for germs, I wouldn't have them round me for a fortune."
I said nothing. I knew I had deserved it, and I kept quiet.
When he reached my face he looked searchingly at it.
The barber gradually subsided. Under other circumstances he would have told me something of the spring training of the baseball clubs, or the last items from the Jacksonville track, or any of those things which a cultivated man loves to hear discussed between breakfast and business. But I was not worth it. As he neared the end of the shaving he spoke again, this time in a confidential, almost yearning, tone.
