Impudence

That man wouldn’t take to old age kindly. (How old was he? Forty? Maybe fifty?) Wouldn’t take to sickness kindly, or enfeeblement. Losses kindly. One in particular that Mrs. Dooley said struck only the men (“impudence,” she named it in a whisper), and when that happened they’d hang theirself as soon as look at you. Not all, of course, but some. Though why a man should take it to heart like that she didn’t know, when you considered how tiny a part them particular ornaments was of their whole body, and how little what they did amounted to, except in the case of fathering George Washington or, say, our own dear Prophet. If impudence, though, had actually struck the doctor, none of the ladies had any way of knowing.
     --From Variation West