But to a slightly longer gaze, not
grief, but mirth, was revealed as his emotion; while a more searching
scrutiny was proportionately more puzzling--he seemed about to burst
out crying or to burst out laughing, one or the other, inevitably, but
it was impossible to decide which. And Bibbs never, on any occasion
of his life, either laughed aloud or wept.
He was a "disappointment" to his father. At least that was the
parent's word--a confirmed and established word after his first
attempt to make a "business man" of the boy. He sent Bibbs to "begin
at the bottom and learn from the ground up" in the machine-shop of the
Sheridan Automatic Pump Works, and at the end of six months the family
physician sent Bibbs to begin at the bottom and learn from the ground
up in a sanitarium.
"You needn't worry, mamma," Sheridan told his wife. "There's nothin'
the matter with Bibbs except he hates work so much it makes him sick.
I put him in the machine-shop, and I guess I know what I'm doin' about
as well as the next man. Ole Doc Gurney always was one o' them nutty
alarmists. Does he think I'd do anything 'd be bad for my own flesh
and blood? He makes me tired!"
Anything except perfectly definite health or perfectly definite
disease was incomprehensible to Sheridan.
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