"Oh, just to enjoy your society. I get lonesome sometimes. I tell you a man does get lonesome in this world, when he has nothing to lean on but a blooming button factory and a stepmother who flits among the world's expensive sanatoria. I know you have never had 'Button, button, who's got the button?' chanted in your ears, but may I ask whether you have ever known the joy of a stepmother? I can see that your answer will be an unregretful negative." He was quite the fool again, and stared at me vacuously. "My stepmother is not the common type of juvenile fiction. She has never attempted during her widowhood to rob the orphan or to poison him. Bless your Irish heart, no! She's a good woman, and rich in her own right, but I couldn't stand her dietary. She's afraid I'm going to die, Donovan! She thinks everybody's going to die. Father died of pneumonia and she said ice-water in the finger-bowl did it, and she wanted to have the butler arrested for murder. She had a new disease for me every morning. It was worse than being left with a button-works to draw a stepmother like that. She ate nothing but hot water and zweibach herself, and shuddered when I demanded sausage and buckwheat cakes every day. She wept and talked of the duty she owed to my poor dead father; she had promised him, she said, to safeguard my health; and there I was, as strong as an infant industry, weighed a hundred and seventy-six pounds when I was eighteen, and had broken all the prep school records. She made me so nervous talking about her symptoms, and mine--that I didn't have!--that I began taking my real meals in the gardener's house. But to save her feelings I munched a little toast with her. She caught me one day clearing up a couple of chickens and a mug of bass with the gardener, and it was all over. She had noticed, she said, that I had been coughing of late--I was doing a few cigarettes too many, that was all--and wired to New York for doctors. She had all sorts, Donovan--alienists and pneumogastric specialists and lung experts.