s; so
she was coming. The professor did not wish to be superintended, he
wanted to take cold in comfort without being asked how he took it, and
he abominated preserves; to all of which Jane was supremely
indifferent. Jane came; the professor wore overshoes and ate
preserves--meekly.

So the professor lived with his sister. At first the direful system
which ruled everything from the time of the cat's entrance to the date
when the furnace fire should be started, chafed on him. His
declarations of independence were received pityingly, as the prattles
of a tired child. Gradually he resigned himself, and the germs of
discontent followed the wake of the other germs which Jane had
promptly and forcefully annihilated.

So the years went on; in time the professor grew tired of ranting and
mild objections gave way to sighs of resignation. There had been bones
to pick in plenty. The professor had a sneaking fondness for dirt--not
mud, but historic dust, so to speak; Jane decreed all foreign matter
as damned eternally. The professor liked fiction; he had once in the
first years of Jane's rule started a novel, which having been
inadvertently left in the living-room, was consigned to the flames;
Jane had intimated, moreover, that the authors of such monstrosities
would probably end in the embrace of the same element. Whereupon the
professor's wrath was great; but his house was built on the sand; so
was his novel; and five years afterwards he knew it.

Although Jane's fanatical cleanliness had been far-reaching, the
professor's study was nearly immune. In the first place the door was
usually locked and the key discreetly lost; and in the next place the
professor had mildly but very obstinately insisted, through all the
twenty years, that his desk, which is the sanctum sanctorum of the man
with a past, remain untouched. Jane sniffed copiously over this
stipulation, and, as she liked to do a thing thoroughly or not at all,
the study remained as a whole comfortably mussy. Sometimes, however,
Jane had twinges of conscience, resulting in the disappearance of all
old, unbound, and destructible matter which presented itself. So the
professor painstakingly replaced equally old and disreputable matter
around the study when the whirlwind had passed, and waited till the
dust settled.

Of late the professor had been ill with a chronic rheumatism. He
grumbled a good deal about the "positively senile" character of his
affliction and finally a