"Excitement? Well, I suppose that's what some call it." "And so," pursued Stainton, "made such an ass of myself----" "Now you're getting down to facts," Holt agreed. "In the first place," said Stainton, "I repeat that I am not crazy." "Then I am," said Holt with conviction. "You are the best judge of that, George." Holt smiled. "Wait a bit," said Stainton. "I wouldn't be surprised, George, if you were a trifle mad; as for me, just make up your mind that J. G. Stainton is sane." "That's what they all say," Holt interposed. "Bellevue's full of men that are sane. Still, anything to get on with your story: sane you are." "No, you mustn't grant it that way. I want you to draw your conclusions from what I am going to tell you." Holt groaned. "All right; all right," he said, "but for Heaven's sake _tell_ it!" Stainton settled himself in his chair. He lit a cigar. "I have to begin," he said, "at the beginning. The average man's biography is the story of an internecine war, a war between his heart and his head, and the heart generally wins. What has won with me, you may, as I said, judge for yourself. My father was a doctor in one of those little towns that are scattered about Boston in the way that the smaller drops of ink are scattered about the big splash on a blotter. My mother died when I was born. The governor didn't have a big practice, but it was a steady one, and, if he was the sort that would never be rich, at least he promised to be the sort that would never starve. What he mostly wanted was to send me to Harvard, and then to make a surgeon of me." "I knew you must have had a good coach in bandaging," said Holt. Stainton disregarded this reference to the grizzly. "I could never make out," he resumed, "why so many parents think they have a right to determine their children's tastes and trades. That tendency is one of our several modern forms of slavery. Most men seem to assume that Fate, by making them fathers through no will of their own, has played them a low trick, and that they are therefore right in revenging themselves on Fate by training their sons into being exactly the sort of men that they themselves have been, so that Fate will thus be forced, you see, to do the same thing all over again." "I don't see," said Holt. "But don't mind me." "Very well. I am not condemning my father. He was without conscious malice, and he did his best, poor man. I dare say, after all, that he was like most of us: so thoroughly pleased with his own life that he couldn't imagine doing any better for the world than giving it another life of precisely the same kind. Anyhow, I never was intended by nature for a doctor, still less for a surgeon, as you will see. The truth is, I was afraid." "Afraid? _You!_" Holt laughed at the idea. "I don't believe it," he said. "I was. I was afraid of two things: old age and death. They were the twin horrors of my boyhood. They are still my twin horrors."