on your arrival home. But in about an hour or so you feel as if you
could sit up and take a little nourishment. And you do. Then you
smoke, seriously; you see friends; you potter; you play cards; you
flirt with a book; you note that old age is creeping on; you take a
stroll; you caress the piano.... By Jove! a quarter past eleven.
You then devote quite forty minutes to thinking about going to bed;
and it is conceivable that you are acquainted with a genuinely good
whisky. At last you go to bed, exhausted by the day's work. Six
hours, probably more, have gone since you left the office--gone like
a dream, gone like magic, unaccountably gone!

That is a fair sample case. But you say: "It's all very well for
you to talk. A man *is* tired. A man must see his friends. He
can't always be on the stretch." Just so. But when you arrange to
go to the theatre (especially with a pretty woman) what happens?
You rush to the suburbs; you spare no toil to make yourself glorious
in fine raiment; you rush back to town in another train; you keep
yourself on the stretch for four hours, if not five; you take her
home; you take yourself home. You don't spend three-quarters of an
hour in "thinking about" going to bed. You go. Friends and fatigue
have equally been forgotten, and the evening has seemed so
exquisitely long (or perhaps too short)! And do you remember that
time when you were persuaded to sing in the chorus of the amateur
operatic society, and slaved two hours every other night for three
months? Can you deny that when you have something definite to look
forward to at eventide, something that is to employ all your
energy--the thought of that something gives a glow and a more
intense vitality to the whole day?

What I suggest is that at six o'clock you look facts in the face and