"What would you have us do, move mountains?" demanded the Doctor. "I'm not afraid to tackle almost any kind of fever known to medical science, but the shopping-fever--well, it is incurable. Once it gets hold of a man or a woman, and more especially a woman, there isn't anything that I know of can get it out of the system. I grant you that it is as much of a disease as scarlet, typhoid, or any other, but the mind has not yet been discovered that can find a remedy for it short of abject poverty, and even that has been known to fail." "That's true enough," said the Idiot, "but what you can do is to make it harmless. There are lots of diseases that our forefathers used to regard as necessarily fatal that nowadays we look upon as mere trifles, because people can be put physically into such a condition that they are practically immune to their ravages." "Maybe so--but if people will shop they are going to be knocked out by it. I don't see that we doctors can do anything to mitigate the evil effects of the consequences _ab initio_. After the event we can pump you full of quinine and cod-liver oil and build you up again, but the ounce of prevention for shopping troubles is as easily attainable as a ton of radium to a man with eight cents and a cancelled postage-stamp in his pocket," said the Doctor. "Nonsense, Doctor. You're only fooling," said the Idiot. "A college president might as well say that boys will play football, and that there's nothing they can do to stave off the inevitable consequences of playing the game to one who isn't prepared for it. You know as well as anybody else that from November 15th to December 24th every year an epidemic of shopping is going to break out in our midst. You know that it will rage violently in the last stage beginning December 15th, thanks to our habit of leaving everything to the last minute. You know that the men and women in your care, unless they have properly trained for the exigencies of the epidemic period, will be prostrated physically and nervously, racked in bone and body, aching from tip to toe, their energy exhausted and their spines as limp as a rag, and yet you claim you can do nothing. What would we think of a football trainer who would try thus to account for the condition of his eleven at the end of a season? We'd bounce him, that's what." "Perhaps that gigantic intellect of yours has something to suggest," sneered the Doctor. "Certainly," quoth the Idiot. "I dreamed it all out in my sleep last night. I dreamed that you and I together had started a series of establishments all over the country--" "To eradicate the shopping evil?" laughed the Doctor. "A sort of Keeley Cure for shopping inebriates?" "Nay, nay," retorted the Idiot. "The shopping inebriate is too much of a factor in our commercial prosperity to make such a thing as that popular. My scheme was a sort of shopnasium." "A what?" roared the Doctor.