“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.  He had a genuine conviction that lack of physical persistence in any task involving money must be due to some subtle weakness of character itself, to some profound shiftlessness or slyness.  He understood typhoid fever, pneumonia, and appendicitis—­one had them, and either died or got over them and went back to work—­but when the word “nervous” appeared in a diagnosis he became honestly suspicious:  he had the feeling that there was something contemptible about it, that there was a nigger in the wood-pile somewhere.

“Look at me,” he said.  “Look at what I did at his age!  Why, when I was twenty years old, wasn’t I up every morning at four o’clock choppin’ wood—­yes! and out in the dark and the snow—­to build a fire in a country grocery store?  And here Bibbs has to go and have a doctor because he can’t—­Pho! it makes me tired!  If he’d gone at it like a man he wouldn’t be sick.”

He paced the bedroom—­the usual setting for such parental discussions —­in his nightgown, shaking his big, grizzled head and gesticulating to his bedded spouse.  “My Lord!” he said.  “If a little, teeny bit o’ work like this is too much for him, why, he ain’t fit for anything!  It’s nine-tenths imagination, and the rest of it—­well, I won’t say it’s deliberate, but I would like to know just how much of it’s put on!”

“Bibbs didn’t want the doctor,” said Mrs. Sheridan.  “It was when he was here to dinner that night, and noticed how he couldn’t eat anything.  Honey, you better come to bed.”

“Eat!” he snorted.  “Eat!  It’s work that makes men eat!  And it’s imagination that keeps people from eatin’.  Busy men don’t get time for that kind of imagination; and there’s another thing you’ll notice about good health, if you’ll take the trouble to look around you Mrs. Sheridan:  busy men haven’t got time to be sick and they don’t get sick.  You just think it over and you’ll find that ninety-nine per cent. of the sick people you know are either women or loafers.  Yes, ma’am!”

“Honey,” she said again, drowsily, “you better come to bed.”

“Look at the other boys,” her husband bade her.  “Look at Jim and Roscoe.  Look at how they work!  There isn’t a shiftless bone in their bodies.  Work never made Jim or Roscoe sick.  Jim takes half the load off my shoulders already.  Right now there isn’t a harder-workin’, brighter business man in this city than Jim.  I’ve pushed him, but he give me something to push against. You can’t push ’nervous dyspepsia’!  And look at Roscoe; just look at what that boy’s done for himself, and barely twenty-seven years old—­married, got a fine wife, and ready to build for himself with his own money, when I put up the New House for you and Edie.”