our locks shorn our wife tells us that we have got them too short. She
says that our head has a very homely and bourgeois bullet shape, a sort
of pithecanthropoid contour, which is revealed by a close trim. After
five weeks' growth, however, we begin to look quite distinguished. The
difficulty then is to ascertain just when the law of diminishing returns
comes into play. When do we cease to look distinguished and begin to
appear merely slovenly? Careful study has taught us that this begins to
take place at the end of sixty-five days, in warm weather. Add five days
or so for natural procrastination and devilment, and we have seventy
days interval, which we have posited as the ideal orbit for our
tonsorial ecstasies.

When at last we have hounded ourself into robbing our employer of those
thirty-three minutes, plus fifteen seconds for you know what, we find
ourself in the barber's chair. Despairingly we gaze about at the little
blue flasks with flowers enameled on them; at the piles of clean
towels; at the bottles of mandrake essence which we shall presently
have to affirm or deny. Under any other circumstances we should deeply
enjoy a half hour spent in a comfortable chair, with nothing to do but
do nothing. Our barber is a delightful fellow; he looks benign and does
not prattle; he respects the lobes of our ears and other vulnerabilia.
But for some inscrutable reason we feel strangely ill at ease in his
chair. We can't think of anything to think about. Blankly we brood in
the hope of catching the hem of some intimation of immortality. But no,
there is nothing to do but sit there, useless as an incubator with no
eggs in it. The processes of wasting and decay are hurrying us rapidly
to a pauperish grave, every instant brings us closer to a notice in the
obit column, and yet we sit and sit without two worthy thoughts to rub
against each other.