[cont.] ... That's nothing

Sometimes it seemed I had become merely a boiler-gauge watcher and fire-stoker, throwing my painstakingly-designed delicate precision machinery to be smelted by his ravenous, fickle-yet-indiscriminate passion; the molten sludge of my designs’ own material oozing through the filigree of the tines and borings of cogs, carefully-set parallels giving way to the buckling of hub-bars and precision-filed disks.
I had met with Franklin more than a few times. He wore the sheen of fellow-well-met over a seething vat of infantile lust. No, he was as charming as a fat, happy infant. But just as one dangles the pendant from one’s necklace in front of him to see his delight, one realizes he is not an infant, but a man, and there were consequences to consider.
He seemed delighted for my company, but at the same time wary, unable to let down his guard. Each time we met seemed some kind of contest. It was hard for me to say who had won at the end of any session; his “You’re catching on” chuckle was only a slight intonation different than his “You’re just not getting it” chuckle and it was as if we were playing “You’re getting warmer,” with him knowing no more about the end but “I’ll know it when I hear it.” Sometimes all the easier to tell him what it was he wanted, but other times he just seemed to be brooding, and making me run back and forth across vast tracts of logical territory. Then I detested him and detested my own earnestness. Where did it end? Something always came next, there was always next time, and his little bent-fingered waggling wave good-bye. “Toodle-Ooo!” he’d say, his bifocals twinkling and throwing a little coin of light down the front of my person. It drove me mad. I’d go back to my drawing board and draw mechanical methods of transport that would carry me away, read the Gazette and make applications to newly-staked-out western cities in need of everything that makes a city.