Tom Paine

Sometimes the old pieties were still visited upon them. Hearing
that Paine was ailing, ministers and well-meaning folk were forever
stopping by to pester him, hoping to get him to recant his heresies
and to accept Jesus Christ as his savior. Jarvis was usually able to
keep them out of the studio, but on one occasion let his guard down
when a knock came at the door shortly after dinner. Jarvis opened it
to find a very old woman, wrapped in a large scarlet cloak, and
asking piteously to meet Thomas Paine.
He's asleep, Jarvis explained—he always takes his nap after dinner.
“I am very sorry for that,” she said, “for I wanted to see him very
particularly.”
It seemed a shame to force a frail and elderly lady to make the trip
a second time, and Jarvis relented. Leading her inside and back to
Paine’s room, the painter woke up the slumbering infidel.
“He rose on one elbow”—it was recalled soon afterward with
some mirth—“with an expression of eye that staggered the old
woman.”
“What do you want?” he demanded.
“Is your name Paine?” the old woman asked solicitously.
“Well, then,” she began kindly. “I come from Almighty God to tell
you that if you do not repent of your sins and believe in our h/erred Savior
Jesus Christ, you will he damned and—”
“Pooh! Pooh!” Paine stopped her cold. “It is not true. You were
not sent with any such impertinent message.”
“Jarvis,” Paine sighed, “make her go away. Pshaw, God would not
send such a foolish ugly old woman as you about with his message.
Go away. Go back.” And then, preparing to return to sleep, he
added, “Shut the door.”
The old lady left thunderstruck. Jarvis was enough of a gentle-
man that he probably withheld his laughter until the woman was
out of earshot of his house. He was not unsympathetic to her
piety; he had been raised in a strict religious family himself, and
though he had little use for them now, he thought churches served
a worthy purpose for the rest of society. But as for himself—well,
he was busy. He had paintings to paint and wine to drink. Late in
the evenings, after Paine had had his nap, the two would
Philosophize over a bottle; once after a long conversation deep
Into the night at Ja.rvis’s table, the painter retired for a while, only
upon returning at four A.M. to find Paine still at table——or rather,
underneath it.
“I have the vertigo, the vertigo,” moaned Paine from the floor.
"Yes," Jarvis cracked, raising an eyebrow at the remains of the
bottle, ‘You have it deep- deep!”