human
I don't remember how early in the game the thing began, he resumed, ignoring Grislow's joking interruption,
gpt
Which means that you have been sitting up and taking notice when the coincidences hit, and have forgotten the millions of times when they didn't,
human
Probably, was the ready admission.
gpt
We all do that. But there is one set of 'coincidences,' as you call them, that can't be so easily turned down. Back in the pin-feather time that I mentioned somebody handed me a fact--the discovery of the physiologists about the waste and replacement that goes on in the human organism, bringing around a complete cellular change about once in every seven years. Are you asleep?
human
Not yet; go on,
gpt
It was a long time ago, and I was only a little tad; but I surrounded the idea and took it in literally, in the sense of a sudden and sort of magical change coming at the end of each seven-year period and bound to occur at those particular fixed times. The notion stuck to me like a cockle-bur, and sometimes I wonder if it isn't still sticking.
human
Bugs!
gpt
That is what I say to myself, Murray, every time the fatal period rolls around. And yet----
human
There isn't any 'and yet,' cut in the scoffer derisively.
gpt
This is merely your night for being batty. 'Fatal period'--suffering humanity!
human
No, hold on: let me tell you, Murray--I'd like to get it out of my system if I can. Up to my seventh birthday I was a sickly child, puny and only about half alive. I recollect, as if it were only yesterday, how the neighbor women used to come in and condole with my mother, ignoring me, of course, as if I hadn't any ears. I can remember old Aunt Hetty Parsons saying, time and again: 'No, Mis' Brouillard; you'll never raise that boy the longest day you live!'
gpt
I'm waiting for the 'and yet,'
human
It came--the change, I mean--when I was seven years old. That was the year of our removal to Vincennes from the country village where I was born. Since that time I haven't known what it means to be sick or even ailing.
gpt
Bully old change! applauded Grislow.
human
Is that all?
gpt
No. What the second period spent on my body it took out of my mind. I grew stouter and stronger every year and became more and more the stupidest blockhead that ever thumbed a school-book. I simply couldn't learn, Murray. My mother made excuses for me, as mothers will, but my father was in despair. He was an educated man, and I can imagine that my unconquerable doltishness went near to breaking his heart.
human
You are safely over that stage of it now, at all events, said the hydrographer in exaggerated sarcasm.
gpt
Any man who can stare into the fire and think out fetching little imaginations like these you are handing me----
human
Sometimes I wish they were only imaginings, Grizzy. But let me finish. I was fourteen to a day when I squeezed through the final grammar grade; think of it--fourteen years old and still with the women teachers! I found out afterward that I got my dubiously given passport to the high school chiefly because my father was one of the best-known and best-loved men in the old home town. Perhaps it wasn't the magic seven that built me all over new that summer; perhaps it was only the change in schools and teachers. But from that year on, all the hard things were too easy. It was as if somebody or something had suddenly opened a closed door in my brain and let the daylight into all the dark corners at once.
gpt
Yes; and since that time you have staved your way through the university, and butted into the Reclamation Service, and played skittles with every other man's chances of promotion until you have come out at the top of the heap in the Construction Division, all of which you're much too modest to brag about. But, say; we've skipped one of the seven-year flag-stations. What happened when you were twenty-one--or were you too busy just then chasing the elusive engineering degree to take notice?