Here, I think, we approach the secret of Mark Twain's notorious "laziness." Mr. Paine assures us that he was not lazy in the ordinary sense of the word: "that he detested manual labor is true enough, but at the work for which he was fitted and intended it may be set down here on authority (and despite his own frequent assertions to the contrary) that to his last year he was the most industrious of men." Very well, but what are we to say of that "languor" of his, that love of "the loose luxury of undress and the comfort of pillows" which grew upon him, especially in later years, when he received his company propped up in bed in that gorgeous Persian dressing-gown, that "state of coma and lazy comfort and solid happiness" into which he was always drifting, that indolence which, aside from his incessant billiard-playing, led him to spend "most" of a summer in mid-life playing ten-pins? Much of it, no doubt, was a pose: it was a way of protesting to the public and his matter-of-fact friends that if he was engaged in a pursuit as altogether useless as that of literature, at least he wasn't taking it too seriously. That accounts for what Mr. Paine calls his "frequent assertions to the contrary." But part of this lax mood was involuntary, and is not to be attributed to his Southern temperament; it was the sign that he was essentially unemployed, it was the flapping as it were of those great sails the wind had never filled. There he was, a man, with all the powers and energies of a man, living the irresponsible life of a boy; there he was, an artist, a potential artist, living the life of a journalist; everything he did was a hundred times too easy for him; the goal he had set himself, the goal that had been set for him, was so low that it not only failed to enlist his real forces but actually obliged him to live slackly. He was thus a sort of individual analogy to the capitalist régime which, as Mr. Veblen describes it, is capable of reaping its profits only by maintaining throughout the industrial system in general a certain "incapacity by advisement." And in order to spare himself in his own eyes he convinced himself that this laziness was predestined. Mr. Paine's biography opens with these words: "On page 492 of the old volume of Suetonius, which Mark Twain read until his very last day, there is a reference to one Flavius Clemens, a man of wide repute 'for his want of energy,' and in a marginal note he has written: 'I guess this is where our line starts.'" If people are lazy, one imagines him saying to himself, it may sometimes be their own fault. But who can blame the man who is "born lazy," the man who is descended from a lazy line?