the room when Martin caught him and whirled him around.

"Now look here, Joe," he said; "if you act that way, I'll punch your
head. An for old friends' sake I'll punch it hard. Savve?--you will,
will you?"

Joe had clinched and attempted to throw him, and he was twisting and
writhing out of the advantage of the other's hold. They reeled about the
room, locked in each other's arms, and came down with a crash across the
splintered wreckage of a wicker chair. Joe was underneath, with arms
spread out and held and with Martin's knee on his chest. He was panting
and gasping for breath when Martin released him.

"Now we'll talk a moment," Martin said. "You can't get fresh with me. I
want that laundry business finished first of all. Then you can come back
and we'll talk for old sake's sake. I told you I was busy. Look at
that."

A servant had just come in with the morning mail, a great mass of letters
and magazines.

"How can I wade through that and talk with you? You go and fix up that
laundry, and then we'll get together."

"All right," Joe admitted reluctantly. "I thought you was turnin' me
down, but I guess I was mistaken. But you can't lick me, Mart, in a
stand-up fight. I've got the reach on you."

"We'll put on the gloves sometime and see," Martin said with a smile.

"Sure; as soon as I get that laundry going." Joe extended his arm. "You
see that reach? It'll make you go a few."

Martin heaved a sigh of relief when the door closed behind the
laundryman. He was becoming anti-social. Daily he found it a severer
strain to be decent with people. Their presence perturbed him, and the
effort of conversation irritated him. They made him restless, and no
sooner was he in contact with them than he was casting about for excuses
to get rid of them.

He did not proceed to attack his mail, and for a half hour he lolled in
his chair, doing nothing, while no more than vague, half-formed thoughts
occasionally filtered through his intelligence, or rather, at wide
intervals, themselves constituted the flickering of his intelligence.

He roused himself and began glancing through his mail. There were a
dozen requests for autographs--he knew them at sight; there were
professional begging letters; and there were letters from cranks, ranging
from the man with a working model of perpetual motion, and the man who
demonstrated that the surface of the earth was the inside of a hollow
sphere, to the man seeking fi