I came, I meant, as soon as I could. I wasn't a dumbbell. I didn't let that gob grow inside my neck, week after week, in secret fear. I did what you told me to do. He said, "Well, well," and injected me and clipped off a hunk and told me to come back on Monday at twelve o'clock. I went onto the street again. It wasn't bothering me any. Nobody could catch it from me. Another cab slid to a stop on another pile of metropolitan offal. I got in. The radio was talking about Babe Ruth, who had recently died of throat cancer. And metastases. I thought of telling the driver to turn off the lush woe. Life's ironies amuse cynical people--who are, after all, sentimentalists, for only sentimental people would bother themselves to beget so foolish a self-defense as cynicism. "Terrible loss," the driver said, waiting for the Madison Avenue light. I chose this better opportunity. "Loss, hell! A baseball player. A tough guy. Somebody with trick reflexes who could bat a ball farther than anybody else, oftener. And the whole damned United States gets choked up and goes into mourning. Double-page spreads in the newspapers. When a really great man dies, he's lucky to get one snapshot and a column." I looked quickly at his framed license. Saul Kaufman. "Will the American people go on a morbid spree when Einstein dies?" I asked. It got him. He glanced back appreciatively. "You said it!" If his name had been Angelo Utrillo, I would have suggested Fermi. He wouldn't have known who Fermi was, but my explanation would have filled him with pride. And if it had been Michael Riority, I would have tried De Valera. "Babe Ruth," I repeated when I paid my fare. "Did the _Mirror_ and the _News_ give Freud a double-page spread? The greatest mind in the twentieth century. Greatest Jew since Jesus. We should be proud to live in the same age. But what are we proud of? Babe Ruth. Baseball's okay--but the way people act about it certainly shows what's wrong with people." "You're right, Mac." I tipped him a quarter. Money wasn't going to be useful to me much longer. Then I felt sick. The money I possessed--the insurance--the money that might come from my books and perhaps from the posthumous sale of a few stories to the movies--would be all there was for my wife daughter my wife's mother and some others.