How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day
Page: 16

I will leave you all that to spend as you choose. You may read your
newspapers then.

I meet you again as you emerge from your office. You are pale and tired.
At any rate, your wife says you are pale, and you give her to understand
that you are tired. During the journey home you have been gradually
working up the tired feeling. The tired feeling hangs heavy over the
mighty suburbs of London like a virtuous and melancholy cloud,
particularly in winter. You don't eat immediately 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