The occasion arrived sooner than I had feared.  Alpha had an illness.  It was not alarming, and yet it was sufficiently formidable.  It began with colitis, and ended with appendicitis and an operation.  Soon after Alpha had risen from his bed and was cheerfully but somewhat feebly about again I met him at a club.  He was sitting in an arm-chair in one of the huge bay-windows of the club, and gazing with bright interest upon the varied spectacle of the street.  The occasion was almost ideal.  I took the other arm-chair in the semicircle of the window.  I saw at once by his careless demeanour that his illness had taught him nothing, and I determined with all my notorious tact and persuasiveness to point a moral for him.

And just as I was clearing my throat to begin he exclaimed, with a jerk of the elbow and a benevolently satiric smile: 

“See that girl?”

A plainly-dressed young woman carrying a violin-case crossed the street in front of our window.

“I see her,” said I.  “What about her?”

“That’s Omega’s second daughter.”

“Oh, Omega,” I murmured.  “Haven’t seen him for ages.  What’s he doing with himself?  Do you ever meet him nowadays?”

Said Mr. Alpha: 

“I happened to dine with him—­it was chiefly on business—­a couple of days before I fell ill.  Remarkably strange cove, Omega—­remarkably strange.”

“Why?  How?  And what’s the matter with the cove’s second daughter, anyway?”

“Well,” said Alpha, “it’s all of a piece—­him and his second daughter and the rest of the family.  Funny case.  It ought to interest you.  Omega’s got a mania.”

“What mania?”

“Not too easy to describe.  Call it the precaution mania.”

“The precaution mania?  What’s that?”

“I’ll tell you.”

And he told me.

V

“Odd thing,” said Alpha, “that I should have been at Omega’s just as I was sickening for appendicitis.  He’s great on appendicitis, is Omega.”

“Has he had it?”

“Not he!  He’s never had anything.  But he informed me that before he went to Mexico last year he took the precaution of having his appendix removed, lest he might have acute appendicitis in some wild part of the country where there might be no doctor just handy for an operation.  He’s like that, you know.  I believe if he had his way there wouldn’t be an appendix left in the entire family.  He’s inoculated against everything.  They’re all inoculated against everything.  And he keeps an elaborate medicine-chest in his house, together with elaborate typewritten instructions which he forced his doctor to give him—­in case anything awful should happen suddenly.  Omega has only to read those instructions, and he could stitch a horrible wound, tie up a severed artery, or make an injection of morphia or salt water.  He has a thermometer in every room and one in each bath.  Also burglar-alarms