THE DYSPEPTIC
The dyspeptic generally wants to tell you all about it. That is a bore
to begin with; for nobody in the world wants to hear anybody in the
world tell all about anything in the world. Oh, those wearisome,
breathless people, who insist upon giving you the tiresome details of
insipid trivialities! There is no escape from them; they are
everywhere. They are to be found on farms, in mining-camps, in women's
clubs, in churches, jails, and lunatic asylums, and the nearest
approach to a release from them is to be fashionable, for in society
nobody ever is allowed to finish a sentence.
This sort of a bore can only be explained on the microbe theory. None
other can account for its universality. You can carry contagion of it
in your clothes and inoculate a person of weak mental constitution,
who is of a build to take anything, until, in a fortnight, he or she
will be a hopeless slave to the tell-all-about-everything habit. There
is nothing like the pleasing swiftness of some of our modern diseases
about it--such as heart failure, which nips you off painlessly. It is
rather like the old-fashioned New England consumption, which gives you
a hectic flush and an irritating hack, but which you can thrive on for
fifty years and then die of something else.
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