inevitably into a routine. Fatted ease is good for no one. It sucks the
soul out of a man. Kirk, as he sat smoking in the cool dusk of the
studio, was wondering, almost in a panic, whether all was well with
himself.

This mild domestic calamity had upset him so infernally. It could not
be right that so slight a change in his habits should have such an
effect upon him. George had been so little hurt--the doctor gave him a
couple of days before complete recovery--that it had not seemed worth
while to Kirk to engage a substitute. It was simpler to go out for his
meals and make his own bed. And it was the realization that this
alteration in his habits had horribly disturbed and unsettled him that
was making Kirk subject himself now to an examination of quite unusual
severity.

He hated softness. Physically, he kept himself always in perfect
condition. Had he become spiritually flabby? Certainly this unexpected
call on his energies would appear to have found him unprepared. It
spoiled his whole day, knowing, when he got out of bed in the morning,
that he must hunt about and find his food instead of sitting still and
having it brought to him. It frightened him to think how set he had
become.

Forty-eight hours ago he would have scorned the suggestion that he
coddled himself. He would have produced as evidence to the contrary his
cold baths, his exercises, his bouts with Steve Dingle. To-day he felt
less confidence. For all his baths and boxing, the fact remained that
he had become, at the age of twenty-six, such a slave to habit that a
very trifling deviation from settled routine had been enough to poison
life for him.