This obvious thing was wholly a mystery to both parents; the mother was nonplussed, failed to trace and connect; and the father regarded his son as a stubborn and mysterious fool, an impression not effaced as the years went by.
At twenty-two, Bibbs was physically no more than the outer scaffolding of a man, waiting for the building to begin inside--a long-shanked, long-faced, rickety youth, sallow and hollow and haggard, dark-haired and dark-eyed, with a peculiar expression of countenance; indeed, at first sight of Bibbs Sheridan a stranger might well be solicitous, for he seemed upon the point of tears.

But to a slightly longer gaze, not grief, but mirth, was revealed as his emotion; while a more searching scrutiny was proportionately more puzzling--he seemed about to burst out crying or to burst out laughing, one or the other, inevitably, but it was impossible to decide which.

And Bibbs never, on any occasion of his life, either laughed aloud or wept.
He was a "disappointment" to his father.

At least that was the parent's word--a confirmed and established word after his first attempt to make a "business man" of the boy.

He sent Bibbs to "begin at the bottom and learn from the ground up" in the machine-shop of the Sheridan Automatic Pump Works, and at the end of six months the family physician sent Bibbs to begin at the bottom and learn from the ground up in a sanitarium.
"You needn't worry, mamma," Sheridan told his wife.